


heart with its hundred mouths open

by doors



Category: TOMORROW X TOGETHER | TXT (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, First Time, M/M, Mutual Pining, Roommates, Vague Concepts of Home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 20:00:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 38,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30144813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doors/pseuds/doors
Summary: Home, in existence, is a place of love.
Relationships: Choi Beomgyu/Choi Soobin
Comments: 25
Kudos: 75





	heart with its hundred mouths open

**Author's Note:**

> so, this is a bad decision but i'm making it anyway! huge thanks to [hauntplace](https://ao3.org/users/hauntplace/) for the beta, ilysm
> 
> [title](https://cospinol.tumblr.com/post/645868133958254592/heart-with-its-hundred-mouths-open-heart-with) / i hit a huge writers block march 2019 and wasn’t able to churn out any meaningful thing since then so the inexperience MIGHT show, but it’s a thing i wrote, a thing i completed for the first time in a while, and had to put up here :] + it's purely self indulgent and written on a whim? so like, don't expect TOO MUCH this initially had no plot whatsoever

  
  
  


If there’s one way to describe Beomgyu, it’s July in a bottle. There’s so much going around him, about him, that no one knows where the beginning of things that make him who he is lies. He’s colourful, in a way ― like the month of July. Like summer, when it falls, as it falls blanketing their city in a state of quiet, measured static of traffic and a warm breeze that does not bite. That’s Beomgyu, in a word, in a second. That’s Beomgyu, in the stretch of space between the blue of the sky and the reflection of it in the clearwater lakes that run past their campus. That’s Beomgyu, alright. Colourful, vibrant, alive and always the centre of the universe.

To Soobin, Beomgyu is home personified. The décor in their apartment, the plant Beomgyu takes care of in his absence, the nights they drink together and the morning Soobin makes them both breakfast. Beomgyu is the home Soobin has made for himself. And that’s probably where the problem lies, or at least a part of it.

Not to quote Richard Siken but the only way to define something is to take two things and explain the space between them. And Soobin likes to think of himself as someone who is pretty smart and yet this is something he has never been able to do.

After all, how do you answer a question differently when you already know the right way to answer it?

  
  
  


The first time Soobin notices his little… _thing_ for Beomgyu in his clothes, he’s running late to dinner and Beomgyu has spammed him with more than twenty texts that repeat the same **_i WILL dump ur food in the trash hyung_** over and over again. He’s replied to most of them with a **_the bus is late!!!!! It’s not my fault!!! Don’t touch my food_** but they’ve gotten incessantly annoying the longer he takes to come back home and Soobin has given up on responding rationally. He’s got half a mind to answer with the threat of shoving all of Beomgyu’s sweaters in the heavy rinse wash so they shrink and ruin his _winter fashion_ if he doesn’t stop making Soobin want to scale buildings to ensure the safety of his food but the bus chooses to come to a stop with a sneeze right then, the pause emanating a tangent puff of burnt petrol and gravel. 

So much for threats. 

He opens his phone and sends Beomgyu an **_omy_** paired with a knife emoji and moves as quick as he can down the lane. As third years and comparatively seasoned Seoul residents, they’ve gotten the right to their own apartment but Soobin remembers the first time they met as freshmen, when Beomgyu was twenty, still dark haired and sporting an annoyingly charming smile with no concept of boundaries. They weren’t living in this neighborhood then, didn’t have the kind of money or security to be able to rent out a place in such a residential hub. They were just two awkward boys stuck day in and out in a dorm room with no third person to bridge them together. 

Somehow, they’d gotten along. And not only had they gotten along, they’d gotten along _well_. They fit together, Soobin had noticed over the countless times they had to work their routines in a way to not inconvenience the other, over the breakfasts and dinners, over the shoulders given without question or berate when one needed a place to rest. They fit well together, surprisingly so. 

But there had been a time when Soobin had wanted to strangle Beomgyu in his sleep and Beomgyu had actually tried to set Soobin’s favourite set of stationary on fire. It was their biggest fight, back in first year, about something like personal space or whatever.

Despite being a generally messy person, Soobin is well versed in the habit of leaving his things only in spaces that _belong_ to him. Beomgyu, however, has no concept of such manners and leaves his things _everywhere._

Soobin is used to it now, it almost feels odd when he comes back home and doesn’t see at least a few of Beomgyu’s things lying by the doorway ― be it shoes or his three million won _Ji Mann’s Forever Collection_ denim jacket that Beomgyu’s Art Council friends bought for him by pooling money after he won their year the GCs held in their department annually. Being an art student, Beomgyu’s easel is another thing that makes a common feature in random things lying around their apartment. Beomgyu leaves it wherever he’d been painting right after he’s done, the plenty splattered paint towels and tubes lying all around it and never put back in their places until he pulls himself out of the work completion burnout phase. 

Soobin would never admit it but the chaos makes him feel less homesick. If these three years have taught him anything, it’s that these little things that annoy him normally remind him of home more than any other place ever would. He knows this is a view that can change in any place of residence but he still understands, at some level, that in a home without such dimension to bring it to life, he wouldn’t be as comfortable as he is right now. 

Their home looks lived in. There’s a wind chime by the doorway that jingles whenever the door opens and enough potted plants in their balcony to make it look like a pseudo rooftop garden. Soobin had bought them two semesters ago during exam week and tended to them daily to grow them as they are today. Beomgyu had stepped in on days he couldn’t, taken care of his plants in his place. 

These things have given the apartment life. Soobin knows it would’ve been alive with or without Beomgyu, but he is glad it’s Beomgyu anyway.

But then, back in first year, they’d had a fight about just this. Beomgyu used to leave his things _anywhere_ around the dorm and having been newly acquainted, Soobin wasn’t comfortable with it at all. It was a small space, menial with two raised platforms accounting for beds on either side of the room and a kitchenette in the middle. Beomgyu’s habit of leaving his things everywhere made their room look so cluttered, and Soobin never seemed to be able to tell him to stop doing so because Beomgyu would pull his wide-eyes guilty-face look and Soobin would instantly feel his heart sink. He did end up losing his cool and telling him at some point, and they’d argued about it and not talked for a few weeks straight.

It had been their longest fight. The longest. 

Then they talked after being miserable for a long while, mulled over their differences. Beomgyu understood Soobin needed a clean space to work in as his thoughts were often disorganised, and in return, Soobin learned that chaos helped Beomgyu to give meaning to things and think about them in perspective.

They moved past that. And now, they’re here. 

Beomgyu opens the door with a grin when he sees him, chewing what Soobin thinks is half of the tteokbokki he ordered. He spins around, chopsticks dangling across his finger, and says, “Sorry! I got carried away and ate a part of your portion too.”

Soobin wants to strangle him. There’s no way Beomgyu would actually do that but he’s also fully aware that this is Beomgyu and that means he’s probably scooped out half his part and hidden it away just to drive Soobin up the wall. He likes pressing his buttons like that, likes being a brat and earning a reaction out of Soobin just for the fun of it.

“I’m gonna punch you,” Soobin says in response, shoving past Beomgyu and into their apartment. This apartment is new, they’d rented it only a few months ago. He’d thought, back then, that there was no one he’d rather share a house with. Of course, he contemplates the decision every time Beomgyu pulls something like this. Which is, every week. “I swear to God.”

But when he walks in, dumping his shoes haphazardly by the shoe rack and shrugging his jacket off, the dinner that’s laid out on the table is still kept steaming blissfully hot and his portion remains intact. He forgets what he wanted to say. Or if there _was_ something he wanted to say, in the first place.

Now that he’s finally back home after a long day out, the leering cheers of the crowd he’s been through the whole afternoon is something tangible. School is fun, classes are exhausting and the lab slots make Soobin want to run off into the sunset and never return. But this, the period of time when he gets to come home and not spend the night outside scribbling notes he won’t be able to decipher the next morning, is bliss.

Home is a breath of fresh air after a while of chaos. Warm lights lighting up the inside of their house in a golden glow, pale walls dressed in framed paintings Beomgyu himself has made, the excess green-toned cushions Soobin bought for his own room thrown over the furniture and the plenty other things he recognises with one sight alone. Even the smell is distinct, honey-sweet of the scented candles Beomgyu bought and the spice of the red sauce Soobin likes. 

“Did you have a long day?” Beomgyu asks from somewhere behind him. “Taehyun told me you’d been held back because of some projects that were turned in wrong and you had to help sort them back so I thought I’d order something for both of us in the meantime.”

Soobin turns around and stares at Beomgyu lingering awkwardly in the doorway. He’s dressed in a familiar pair of pyjamas, a red sweater so huge it drowns him in it completely. Beomgyu is not small by any means, he’s almost six feet tall ― taller than the average lot of people in their year ― but his narrow frame feeds into the delusion that he’s smaller than he appears. He likes curling in on himself too, hunching forward and slumping lazily. 

It’s his thing. Big sweaters, small smiles and surprising consideration that makes Soobin pause and gawk for words, nothing working or making sense in that moment alone because he isn’t used to being considered like this. Like the way Beomgyu makes him feel.

With a startling stop, a flutter of his heart and a realisation that sets in somewhere in the middle of his ribs, he thinks: _That’s my sweater._

What comes next, you see, is a chain of reactions.

  
  
  


One thing about the persistence of a thought is that just when you are beginning to forget about it, it returns once again with more abundance and force than last time. 

Rationally, Soobin knows he should probably empty Beomgyu’s closet of all the hoodies he’s stolen from Soobin over the years. Realistically, however, his mind wants to see how far it can push Soobin before he pushes back. That is the train of thoughts he follows to bring himself here to this moment. But record scratch, pull back and take a few seconds from the equation and it brings him to the cafeteria with an excited Kai at his trail.

“Hyung, you can’t take it back alright?” He says, appearing in front of Soobin with a grin twice the size of the world. “You’re paying for everything I buy today.”

Soobin simply whacks him over the back of his head and pushes him under the arch that leads to the dining hall. “I never said that. I said, _Hueningie let’s go for lunch_ and you just automatically assumed I meant that.”

“You invited me for lunch! When was the last time I paid for lunch?”

To be honest, Soobin knew perfectly what he was getting himself into. He’s known Kai since they were kids and Kai punched two of Soobin’s front teeth out when they were still milk and he’s known him long enough to see him at college regularly. When he’d first learned Kai got accepted here, he’d been psyched to throw his _do you like me so much you’d follow me anywhere Hueningie?_ line but when he did see him after almost a year of no contact, he’d been too emotional to say anything at all.

Regardless, he knows what inviting Kai out for lunch means but if he can get himself some wiggle room in their dynamic then he has to try as hard as he can. After all, when it comes to saving money then it’s only right.

The hall is fairly crowded, bustling with still to be spent energy of kids from over five departments Soobin knows for a fact use the Western Cafeteria. Kai, who’d been walking backwards, stumbles over someone’s feet and Soobin’s hands dart out to grab a hold of his wrist before he even knows what he’s doing. Kai steadies himself easily, holding onto Soobin and is back to his previous nonsense in a minute. Soobin, despite himself, snorts at the way there is no change whatsoever in his demeanour. 

“I’m not paying for your lunch,” he says and tries to move past him with a false grimace when another familiar voice joins them.

It’s Beomgyu, holding rolls of canvases in one hand and pushing his hair back with another. “Hyung,” he says, in lieu of greeting. “Where _were_ you?”

Soobin pauses. “Uh. Chem? What’s going on?”

“I’ve been here for the last thirty minutes, _and_ I’ve called you more than ten times! Why is your phone switched off?”

In his periphery, he sees Kai shoot an amused glance between the two of them. He doesn’t get time to pay attention to it because Beomgyu is shoving his way towards him and dumping all the canvases in his hands. He barely gets enough time to grasp them all till Beomgyu pulls his phone out of his back pocket smoothly enough for it to ring like a practised move and glares at him.

Soobin’s heartbeat peaks a new high.

“I knew you’d forget to charge your phone,” Beomgyu says. “Here. Take this.” Like everything that's happened in the last few minutes, he has a power bank in his hand before he even knows it. It’s Beomgyu’s power bank, smooth blue with a funny looking red sticker of a guitar in one corner.

“For me?” Soobin says, high-pitched and shrill just to make Beomgyu uncomfortable. 

Beomgyu just shakes his head. “Just buy me corn soup chips, I’m going to be out till after nine today.”

“Nine,” Soobin frowns, adjusts the set of canvas in his arms and stares at Beomgyu. “Why?”

“Festival rites, I’ll tell you later.” Beomgyu turns to look at Kai. “Do you want something, too? Soobin hyung here has a big heart and a bigger wallet.”

Kai, who’d previously simply just greeted Beomgyu now smiles like he knows something they don’t. 

“Choi Beomgyu don’t rent my wallet out like it’s yours, please shut up―”

“I do! I want kkobukchip too! Hyung, will you buy it for me?”

Soobin doesn’t know what to say. Kai is doing that thing where he smiles wide and bright, inevitably convincing people to do his bidding.

“By all means,” Soobin sighs and darts ahead, dropping the canvases back into Beomgyu’s arms as he goes. Beomgyu cheers from behind, slings a hand across Kai’s neck while fumbling with his posters with the other and follows Soobin into the cafeteria out of the dining hall. He vaguely hears Kai say something like _when I asked_ but successfully drowns him out. It gets difficult to tune the two of them out the longer they stand in the queue because Kai and Beomgyu within seconds of each other are a force to be reckoned with. Still, being with the two of them for almost three years has taught him enough survival skills he needs to make it out through this.

Or at least, that’s what he’d thought. Then, Kai, an unsuspecting or perhaps a very suspicious pedestrian, asks, “Beomgyu hyung, is that your hoodie?”

Huh.

Soobin turns, noticing what he hadn’t noticed before. He’d been too busy grappling with the canvases to see the orange hoodie Beomgyu had been wearing, but now that he turns he sees it clearly in daylight falling in through the windows. It drowns out all commotion around him, the realization that the hoodie that fits his edges neatly enough is way too big on Beomgyu’s frame. In a sight, it reminds him of the sweater Beomgyu wore a week ago while welcoming him home.

“Is that mine?” he asks, before Beomgyu can come up with a defense.

Beomgyu _flushes_ and Soobin registers that faintly too. Faintly and with little warmth tingling up his ears. “I don’t know, it was in my closet.”

“It’s very obviously mine.”

“Do you want me to take it off?”

“No!” Kai puts up a hand in between both of them. “ _Not_ in the goddam cafeteria. Wait till you’re home.”

“To do what?” Beomgyu asks and it takes him two mortifying seconds to realise what was being implied before he looks away in a deeper shade of scarlet than before. “Shut up.”

Soobin wonders why he isn’t actively denying what Kai is implying but the answer is just a little out of his reach. Instead, he decides to save both their prides from a snickering Kai and hits him at the back of his head again. This time, he doesn’t even squeal in pain. He straight up looks more amused. 

Beomgyu refuses to look at him. It’s weird. He’s wearing Soobin’s hoodie and it’s oversized on him and it’s _weird._ Soobin can’t stop thinking about the way Beomgyu’s fingers jut out beneath the too-long sleeves, nimbly holding the rolls with pressure white knuckles.

Wordlessly, he leans. Beomgyu needs to take just one small glance at him to know what he means. He lets Soobin take the rolls from him, ears red. Soobin thinks it’s sort of endearing, and it is. It’s very endearing. 

“You guys,” Kai sounds a lot like he’s trying not to laugh, “are disgusting.”

Maybe so. 

  
  
  


So, case in point: Beomgyu in Soobin’s clothes makes him feel differently about things. That’s not the only case that’s going on recently, though. It’s been a million different things, like the way Beomgyu wakes up on Sundays, eyes swollen and hair brushed to a nonexistent degree, the way he sighs softly after taking a sip of his coffee, the way he likes corn soup flavour chips and is picky with the rest. These are all things that have been bothering Soobin to _immense_ degrees, especially considering the fact that he spends _hours_ after they’ve taken place dissecting them to bits.

For instance, Beomgyu had called Soobin over to his room yesterday _solely_ for the purpose of showing him some kind of book that resurfaced as he was unpacking more boxes from back home, one that he got in a fifth grade writing competition as a reward for being first place. It has a tiger on its cover, his name signed on a certificate on the first page. Beomgyu talked about it with a twinkle in his eyes like there was nothing in this world he loved more than this, and Soobin hadn’t been able to shake that look off the entire day. It was printed behind his eyelids. 

Even now, as he quietly eats breakfast a day later, eyeing Beomgyu flitting around the kitchen making his own cup of coffee so carefully you’d think he’d die if he doesn’t get his required dosage of sugar.

“That isn’t even real coffee,” Soobin snorts, watching him add sugar to warm milk. “What you’re doing is simply drinking flavoured milk.”

“Yeah? So what?” Beomgyu’s picky with his food. It’s an endearing trait. He clicks a tongue out at him, unbothered, and Soobin wonders if he _knows_ what he’s doing and does it anyway. “I’m going to keep drinking _milk_ this way if I like it, so.”

Soobin shakes his head in response. Beomgyu does not care about what other people (Soobin) have to say. That is an endearing trait too.

He wants to flip a table. _Where are all these thoughts coming from?_

He’s not foreign to the concept of having a crush. But this is Beomgyu, the same Beomgyu he’d once had a big enough fight with that he’d been ready to strangle him in his sleep just so he could avoid confrontation. The same Beomgyu who is so unbearably extra with everything he does that it takes Soobin _forever_ to catch up with his thoughts. He’s foreign to the concept of liking _Beomgyu._

It isn’t like having feelings for him is a bad thing. He just. He just doesn’t know where to put it down.

“Hyung?” Beomgyu asks. His voice is low and bled out, like he’s been talking for a long time and Soobin just hasn’t noticed.

Soobin blinks. Very much possible. He likes spacing out. “What?”

“I asked you if you were going out dressed like that.”

Soobin is wearing his favourite black hoodie _and_ has made his face look slightly presentable. He’s even brushed his hair straight, combed it back and tousled it up. “What do you mean?”

Beomgyu sighs. “I have no idea what you’d do without me.”

Soobin frowns as Beomgyu leaves his steaming cup of coffee on the counter and disappears behind the kitchen in the hallways that lead to his room. He comes back, a moment later, with a cashmere coat and a black sweater and ah.

“I’m just going to―”

“Shut up,” Beomgyu says. He comes closer, walking around the island to where Soobin sits by the dining table and Soobin instantly feels every inch of his skin feel warm. _It’s Beomgyu,_ he thinks, but it’s too late to think now. Beomgyu is ducking lower, his fingers are brushing Soobin’s bangs out of the way and Soobin thinks _it’s too fucking late to even consider that._ “Take this off.”

His thoughts make a sound that resembles a keysmash. “What?” he asks.

Beomgyu rolls his eyes impatiently, dumping the coat and sweater by the island and thumbing at the hem of his hoodie. He’s so close now that if Soobin wanted to, he could press the small of his back and push him into his lap.

He blanches.

His heart is hanging by a cliff. It’s falling over. It’s going to drown in the stream below if he doesn’t pull it back up immediately. 

But his hands ― they won’t agree. They won’t move, limp by his side, letting Beomgyu pick his hoodie off.

“What are you doing?” Soobin whispers, heart in his throat, when Beomgyu leans down lower. Beomgyu isn’t looking at him, just frowning at his hoodie and Soobin realises, almost at once, that this is the one Beomgyu gifted him two years ago on his birthday. “Oh,” he flushes, cheeks growing warm. “It’s just―”

Beomgyu laughs and it’s a pretty sound. It settles somewhere in his heart with a slight flutter and a tickle. “Hyung, when I gave you this I didn’t think you’d wear it everywhere _everyday._ ”

“Listen,” Soobin tries to say. “It's comfortable, okay?”

“Of course. Do you want to take it off now?”

“What the fuck―” Soobin shrugs and moves so Beomgyu’s hands leave his person and he steps back, an amused glint in his hand. The look fuels him on more in the moment, completely forgetting that he isn’t wearing anything underneath. He picks at his hoodie and pulls it over his head in one go, smooth and slick till he feels cold air trail up his ribs and looks down to remember he hadn’t actually put on anything under it.

“Soobin-ah, were you really going to go out basically naked?” Beomgyu says but his voice is uneven and his ears are red. 

All of a sudden, Soobin is very much aware of the lack of space between them. 

“This isn’t basically naked,” Soobin says, avoiding his eyes. “I was going to put on a coat over it.”

“This is why you catch cold easily.”

It’s silent then, although charged with something unfamiliar. Soobin puts on the sweater Beomgyu brought him and lets Beomgyu brush his hair back into something presentable. He musses it up, shoves it back and forth till he’s satisfied with how it looks. Soobin wonders what it would be like to bend down and kiss him ― how easy it would be to do so.

So, Soobin has a crush. On Beomgyu. Arguably his best friend, housemate and clearly someone way out of his league.

A crush isn’t something very new for him to have. Soobin is _used_ to falling in love with different things every second of the day. He’d even like ― been attracted _to Beomgyu_ ― for the first few weeks and it had been painfully obvious to Kai, who’d known him long enough to know his tells of falling in love, that he had to drag him aside and ask him if he knew what he was doing. Soobin said, _yeah. I do,_ and promised himself he’d stop thinking about it that way. He thought he’d squashed the thought down before it could even start. It is easy to like someone when you don’t see them everyday, but when you do it’s just a matter of heartbreak.

Soobin stares at Beomgyu’s lips like an idiot. 

Obviously, those feelings never died. He’s had this realization enough times to know that he’s no good at dealing with his feelings for Beomgyu, he just hopes that Beomgyu doesn’t realize and call him out on it. 

When he’s done messing with his hair, Beomgyu leans back and smiles. His hands fall on Soobin’s shoulders, barely touching the side of his neck and yet he shivers slightly.

“You look good,” Beomgyu says.

Soobin tries to make light of those words, of the red high on the apple of Beomgyu’s cheeks. “Do you want something or what? Why are you being nice to me?”

But Beomgyu isn’t dettered. He shakes his head and steps away, folding his hands behind his back. Sunlight panes over the side of his face, lemon and alight. “No,” he says. “You just always look good.”

He’s _so_ fucked.

  
  


Hours later, that day, when Soobin comes back from Yeonjun’s apartment after arranging their project work in order and manoeuvring all that they are still left with, he finds Beomgyu passed out on the couch with a couple of textbooks scattered all around him and chalk pastels in his hands. He’s wearing the hoodie he made Soobin take off, and Soobin doesn’t know what to do with that.

  
  
  


Soobin is a biochem major and it comes with a package of work piling up for months before being completed at the very last minute, assignments he’s forgotten to do, experiments he’s failing and a laboratory he always forgets to lock when he’s returning after a day’s work of achieving no useful derivation at two am. But, he’s got his life ― and he’s got an ambition and sometimes it’s more than what he could ask for. Something to work towards is better than working with nothing, and he knows that.

But on some days, that is a difficult thing to hold true to. The uncertainty of reaching those goals settles in differently. Restlessly. It happens in the middle of the night, when he wakes up with his heartbeat racing and a quiet anxiety that threatens to seep out of his eyes and into the pillows. He tries to turn but his ribs swell, so heavy it feels like they’re cutting off the supply of air to his lungs.

He needs water. And he needs to move. But his legs are frozen.

He’s afraid of that one pending assignment, afraid of that one topic he doesn’t understand. His eyes are wide open, sleep gone by in a wink despite the fact that he’d gone to bed earlier than he had in weeks just to catch up on some rest. His fingertips tingle with the soft reminder of all that he’s let go and hasn’t been able to hold on to, every little thing that he’s been ignoring is now pressing down his chest in a startling reminder of its existence.

In the wake of it all, he feels so lonely. It’s not about being with people or passing by them, he feels lonely for simply lying awake in the middle of the night when everyone else is asleep. When the knowledge that he could scream right now, he could shout, and no one else would know ― he feels so lonely. 

After another five minutes of lying down like that, breathing hard and biting his lips just to ignore the wave of anxiety and go back to sleep, Soobin makes himself move and reaches for the jar of water on his bedside table. When he comes up with nothing he remembers he had forgotten to leave it there when he returned yesterday. 

Soobin groans and throws his head back against his pillow, a dull throbbing sensation at the back of his mind makes him dizzy.

So, he stands and stumbles on his feet for a moment ― feeling more pathetic that he’s failing at something as _basic_ as walking and presses his fingers in the creases of his forehead.

The house is shred in a dark curtain of twilight. It’s still too early for anyone in the neighborhood to be awake but when he glances out of the window, just to calm his nerves if nothing else, he finds that a couple of windows down the street are still alight. 

It does ease his heart a little, the knowledge that he’s not as alone as he thought.

The water boils soundlessly in the kitchen. His heart races, and the more he tries to stop thinking about it, the more he does just that. He’s worried about countless things, the unpaid bills and curriculums ― internships he doesn’t know if he’ll secure.

Then there’s a rustle behind him that makes him jump, mouth open in a scream cut off abruptly.

“Hyung?”

Soobin turns to find Beomgyu sleepily rubbing at his eyelids at the doorway. His throat knots and he stares, unspeaking.

Beomgyu doesn’t need him to say anything. He walks closer without another question, somewhat hesitant when he reaches but still sure of what he wants to do.

His arms, when they wrap around Soobin’s waist, are warm. They’re warm and soft. More reassuring than the idea of making coffee at four am or thinking about things that make him feel at ease. Soobin crumbles like a candlewick in his embrace, face falling in the crook of his neck as Beomgyu whispers something softly into his ears. 

There’s that thing again, about home. There’s no place else in the world Soobin would be comfortable enough voicing his worries in, but somehow Beomgyu helps him talk. Beomgyu picks reason in his drifting thoughts and finds the root of what’s bothering him, doesn’t point it out when Soobin cries halfway through and doesn’t mention it again. He doesn’t talk him out of it either, just lets him cry and when he’s done, he brings him burnt toast, eggs and orange juice for breakfast, nestles his fingers in his hair peaking from under his own blanket and gently puts him back to sleep. 

It’s a fragile thing. Comfort, that is. He doesn’t know what he’d do without it.

  
  
  


Beomgyu is different.

He’s an art major, all set with paint stains and big projects and festival decorations to complete across town. He’s got a _rebel the system_ foundation all the way through, absolutely uncaring of what premade rules dictate for him. He’s the one who’d dragged Soobin to _Pride_ the same year they met, before he’d been confident enough to go by himself. He’s the reason why Soobin does half as much social networking as he does. 

In a sense, in a way, the fact that he’s Beomgyu’s friend ― the fact that he became his roommate ― has always brought nothing short of good fortune to him. He thinks, at twenty-three, he wouldn’t be the person he is if he’d never met Beomgyu. He could always be someone else, he could always be someone, not necessarily bad, but different from who he is in a way he doesn’t think he would like. Beomgyu dug his fingers in the little crevices of Soobin’s heart, the cracks in his rigid personality where life bled through and pulled it apart to reveal what lay on the inside to not only himself but everyone else. He doesn’t think it would’ve happened otherwise. He doesn’t think he’d have ever been able to climb out of his shell on his own and even if he did, he wouldn’t have followed the same way out and maybe that’s where the difference lies. 

Point standing, Beomgyu is an art major. What matters the most to him is freedom of expression. He’s the kind of kid you’d see in activist movements, the kind you’d see holding up spitfire debates in the dormitory at three am about some government policy that incites unrest. He’s the kind of kid Soobin isn’t, but at some point he was ― and maybe that’s why they click so well together.

It boils down to insides and outsides, in the end. Who Beomgyu is on the inside, Soobin is on the outside, who Beomgyu is on the outside, Soobin is on the inside. 

_Insides_ and _outsides_. 

But all of that ― the foolhardy courage and the need to defy the system ― isn’t all that Beomgyu is. The first time they’d met, that’s all he thought Beomgyu was. It isn’t like Beomgyu tries to hide the other facets of his personality, really, it’s that they’re pretty easy to mix in the background. He’s like the quiet chatter in a homely cafe, you don’t notice anything until you are there for that exactly. 

Soobin still routinely stumbles across pages and pages of the songs he’s written, the words in his mind scratched and scribbled to hell and back, the guitar thrown haphazardly against the floor of their living room and Beomgyu himself, spread star-fished on it, telling him _the stars look pretty tonight, hyung_ in the middle of the day. All that and more, an endless list of the little endearing things that make him who he is.

So, Beomgyu is different. Beomgyu’s an art major, the polar-opposite of who he is. Sometimes Soobin finds him in his burnout phases having not taken a shower in days and sometimes he finds him serenading Yeonjun in the middle of the campus. He lives his life like that, like he isn’t afraid of where it’ll bring him. And of course, _of course_ , like the hopeless romantic Soobin is, he’s in love with that. 

Then there’s his quiet calm. Those moments that he remembers in retrospect. On a blue sunday out of time, when they are both lying down on his comforter ― Soobin, outlining some of his notes and keeping track of them and Beomgyu idly strumming his guitar and whispering chords Soobin knows nothing about. He says, “Hyung, do you think anyone would remember us in, say, twenty years― in thirty?”

Soobin frowns, his hand pausing midway through, hovering on the notebook. “What do you mean?”

“Like.” He sits up straight. Soobin’s room is an image of himself, the bulletin boards in one corner containing information of each one of his deadlines and a window big enough to enclose an entire wall on the other. The soft cotton curtains dissipate the sunlight in a warm glow, one that falls on Beomgyu delicately, so pretty Soobin wants to reach up and wipe it off his skin. “If I disappear tomorrow, would anyone outside of you guys even care?”

Soobin remembers Beomgyu offhandedly mentioning he struggles with object permanence two months into their friendship, when he’d been talking to Yeonjun about life and other things Soobin doesn’t particularly remember the context of. He remembers this because he’d googled it, wondering what it meant and how surprised he’d been after finding out. Beomgyu had seemed so ordinarily brave then, uncaring of what the world said about him that he wondered, for the first time, how Beomgyu grew into such a mindset. It’s an oddly terrifying thing to lose sense of the world enough to let it go from your grasp as soon as you close your eyes, and Soobin knows there is probably a story behind it he doesn’t know. 

“I don’t know,” Soobin says. “But I would. I would care, isn’t that enough?”

Beomgyu looks away. Soobin tugs at his wrist, trying to pull him down to his side but he doesn’t budge. Soobin doesn’t even remember when he put his notebook away, but he is sitting up now, hands empty, going to hold Beomgyu’s face in them.

He turns him, palm against cheek, and looks him in the eye. Beomgyu has the prettiest eyes. They’re shaped softly, curved into crescents full of fondness when he’s happy.

“Listen,” Soobin says. “The world is big, the world is big and hard to navigate for a person. You’re my best friend, there are so many things in my life that have been here because you are here. Souvenirs, memories, trips ― even a part of me is a part of you. When I met you I was a different person than who I am now, and me, right now, is a kind of different that has you in it.”

Beomgyu blinks, slowly. He gets like this sometimes, so lonely you can feel it on him. Soobin holds his hand, brings it to his own lap. They’re dry and calloused with the effect of the constant strumming and Soobin rubs them to warmth. “I know it’s difficult to believe you’re leaving a mark on this world by being here. I know it is. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t. And that _doesn’t_ mean that if you disappear tomorrow it wouldn’t make a difference. It will.”

Beomgyu makes a face and Soobin knows he’s going to cry before he even does. Afternoons like these are fragile. Sometimes, Beomgyu nestles in one corner of his bed and refuses to move for days. Sometimes, he writes songs more than he has ever normally and tears them to shreds because _they don’t make any sense,_ because _they don’t have a beginning or an end._

And Soobin knows what that’s like. Soobin knows what that’s like, so he reaches out and holds his hands, pretends he doesn’t see Beomgyu’s face crack and pretends that he isn’t crying. He rubs comforting circles at the back of his hand, he wishes that is enough.

“I want to go home,” he says, in between sobs. “I miss my mother. I want to go home.”

Then there’s a part of Beomgyu homesick to a fault. On most days he goes by pretending he isn’t thinking about home, but then there are those days when his want to go back into the past is a tangible thing. If there’s one thing about Beomgyu that he knows he will always stay true to, it’s how much he misses his family. How much he misses his mother, and his life as a kid in a place so far away from the bustle of the city. 

Soobin feels something inside his heart wilt. He nods, grip tightening on his hands, remembers every assignment undone, every little fear of the future. “We’re all going home,” he says. “We’re all growing up and going home.”

  
  
  


Soobin blames it on the balance they give to each other, the familiarity. If Beomgyu’s the place he feels the safest in to put down his heart, then for Beomgyu, Soobin is the place he feels the safest in to call his home. And maybe, just _maybe,_ those two things are one and the same. 

  
  
  


It would’ve been _pretty_ easy to ignore the daunting feelings climbing over Soobin one by one if Beomgyu didn’t stick to Yeonjun as much as he does.

Soobin used to think they were a thing. They have the potential to be anyway. Yeonjun does anything Beomgyu asks of him and Beomgyu follows him around starry-eyed like a pup in love. It’s not even that hard to skip or walk around it if you know the two of them. For instance, they’re all sitting in the old band room, reeking with its physical ambience of ancient furniture and choir formation, and Beomgyu’s holding an impromptu serenading session on the condition of making Yeonjun dance to it.

And Yeonjun _is_ dancing to it. He’s pretty enthusiastic even. Soobin knows he’s pretty good, he remembers being _awed_ when he first met him at a festival three years ago. Beomgyu dragged him to it four weeks into first year and by the time he got too desperate to leave, the lights dimmed and the concert began. He couldn’t _believe_ when Beomgyu told him Yeonjun was from the school of medicine and not a _dance_ major because every step of his body, ever jump and turn and the flexibility it required, seemed awe-inspiring at most. Yeonjun was an expressive performer, a charmer, he knew what he was doing and did it _well._ Soobin thought Yeonjun had the potential for being a professional dancer, but Beomgyu had waved a hand in between the two of them after the performance and Yeonjun told them then, when he asked, that he loved dancing but he loved research more. 

Even now, when he sees Yeonjun lock his hands and drag his body in twists Soobin thinks would break him if he tried, he’s pretty impressed. He glances at Taehyun from the corner of his eyes and sees him do the same, sitting with his mouth open and his fingers intertwined tightly in his lap. From what Soobin knows, Taehyun used to learn dancing from Yeonjun after his classes and from what he knows, Taehyun learned a lot _more_ than just that.

When Taehyun sees Soobin looking at him, he makes a face that says _I’ll kill you if you open your mouth_ and Soobin bites his lips and drags his gaze back to Yeonjun.

Soobin exhales. 

To Yeonjun, who is now up and close with Beomgyu, mouthing to Beomgyu's singing with a laugh at the edge of his lips and flicking his nose. Beomgyu buts him with his forehead, momentarily pausing his song but still strumming to push his tongue out. 

Soobin isn’t _annoyed_ or anything. He has been in the same position _countless_ times. He just thinks Beomgyu’s desperation is sort of funny.

He also kind of wishes it was him Beomgyu was serenading instead. 

Then Yeonjun steps away and Beomgyu leans back on the steps to the podium, strumming the guitar with his fingers. They glide over the strings so effortlessly; one could think it would be easy to play. But he knows it isn’t. Beomgyu tried teaching him once and it didn’t work. You’d think a boy teaching you how to play the guitar would have something to do with him leaning against your back and holding your hand to teach you basic chords and notes. Instead, what Soobin got was Beomgyu’s incessant nagging and annoyed shoulder slaps. 

The memory of it makes him grimace, specifically when he remembers the way Beomgyu taught _Yeonjun_ a few months ago in the dance room. Yeonjun was sprawled in front of the mirror with a weak hand on the guitar and Beomgyu was guiding it across with his own, softly reading out each sound they made.

Soobin’s expression must show on his face because Taehyun, who seems to have something against him, shoves his shoulder with his own. “Hyung,” he calls out to Beomgyu. “I think you should cheer up Soobin hyung too―”

“What? _No―_ ” Soobin panics and steps in, turning to find Beomgyu eyes already on him. “No, Beomgyu-yah, you can carry on with what you’re doing.”

But Beomgyu’s now sliding over the stairs to the one right above where Soobin is sitting. There is a smile on his face that glows with the light of the sun falling from the stained-glass windows that frame the room. For a second, he laughs and each sound in the room minus Soobin’s heartbeat deafens, and then he starts strumming. Soobin watches in anticipation as the first of chords fly across the span of the theatre, his heart running upwards through his heart in the way he knows it’s visible on his face.

“Soobinie-hyung is an idiot,” he sings. “I’ve never seen a person so stupid before him―”

His hope deflates. Soobin _really_ doesn’t know what he was expecting. Still, it stings. Just a little bit.

“Shut up,” he says and rolls his eyes. He tries to mask over the hurt with a playful slap on Beomgyu’s wrist but Taehyun probably noticed something that wasn’t there in the first place because he nudges Soobin’s shoulder again and offers him an apologetic look.

Soobin needs to― needs to look at something else, besides the pity on Taehyun’s face and the shit-eating grin on Beomgyu’s. His eyes latch on to Yeonjun on the next slide, pushing his knees in front of him like he’s warming up and it’s a mistake because in the next second Yeonjun smiles. 

Soobin can tell a headache from miles away.

“Soobin-ah, are you really that hurt that Beomgyu won’t sing for you?”

Beomgyu’s eyes widen and he leans forward, suddenly so close to Soobin that he swallows the retort stuck in his throat. “Hyung, is that true? Are you hurt?”

“I’m not hurt, shut up. All of you.” Soobin sits back to put some distance between them. He stares at Beomgyu, hoping he gets the cue to back off and thankfully he does. He raises an eyebrow, sits back and doesn’t laugh when Kai tries to ease the situation with a joke.

This shouldn’t even _be_ a situation. There Soobin goes again, making a big deal out of nothing and imposing his feelings on other people to make situations awkward.

Behind Beomgyu, Kai smiles at him. It's a happy smile as opposed to the ridiculing one on Yeonjun’s face, intended at cheering him up ― but it only serves to make him feel worse. He shakes his head at Kai, mustering as much warmth as he can inside himself to smile back at him. 

Then, Beomgyu begins to strum again. 

Soobin pauses. He remembers this tune; he can’t remember the name of this song but he remembers the tune. Beomgyu had mentioned it once or twice in the afternoons they had free when Beomgyu practised his songs. He remembers ― but he can’t remember what it’s called. Beomgyu’s voice is light, a gentle caress and Soobin forgets his shame to log this moment into his brain.

The sun slights on him, Beomgyu closes his eyes and breathes. “Do you know what this song is called, hyung?”

Soobin shakes his head. He’ll probably say yes to whatever Beomgyu asks of him right now. But Beomgyu smiles.

“Then that’s all you get.”

  
  
  


So yeah, maybe Soobin can’t just let his thoughts carry these unrequited feelings away to another realm but he’s planning on never acting on them, content with the way things are. But then Beomgyu ― Choi Beomgyu, home of thoughts that range from usually bad to terribly worse ― asks him if he’s ever kissed someone before.

It’s their third year of fucking college. Of course, he has, he doesn’t know where the question is coming from. Still, he sucks in a breath, takes a sip of his coffee and stares at Beomgyu over the table. It’s vivid, the tang of coffee on his tongue and the smell of it in the air ― the dining room and the dim lights, black cups, black gables, black framed paintings. 

“I have,” he says.

“Oh,” Beomgyu blinks. “Then, you’ve fucked someone before too―”

Soobin chokes, coffee getting stuck on it’s way down. Beomgyu’s eyes widen and he reaches out but Soobin extends a hand in front of himself in lieu of saying it’s okay and coughs his lungs out. 

“Hyung, are you a prude?” Beomgyu is laughing now and Soobin wants to throw the rest of the coffee on his face. “Oh my God.”

“I’m not a prude! You’re just blunt, okay? And where’s the question even coming from?”

And Soobin must have struck a nerve because Beomgyu reddens instantly, eyes dropping to the floor. Soobin raises an eyebrow as the realisation settles and he wonders, out of all things he knows about his best friend, how could he have missed this?

“You’ve…” He trails off, unsure. “You’ve never kissed anyone before?”

Then again, there isn’t a way he’d have ever reached that conclusion. Sure, Beomgyu doesn’t flaunt his love life, doesn’t talk about people all that much. Soobin had once tried to pry out his secrets when they were both freshmen but it had been fruitless, Beomgyu kept a death grip on them. Still, Soobin had thought that in the countless parties they’ve gone to, so many people he has brought home, Beomgyu would’ve― 

Beomgyu looks up from his hands and glares at him, but the apple of his cheeks are still red.

Soobin’s jaw drops. “You have _not?_ ”

“Why is that so surprising?” he demands. 

Soobin closes his mouth. Opens it again. Closes it again. “It’s not surprising,” he says. “It’s just unexpected.”

“Unexpected means it’s surprising!”

“Sure,” Soobin looks at him meaningfully. “So you’ve never― done. Done the other stuff?”

Beomgyu snorts. “I haven’t even kissed anyone.”

“Ah.” This is dangerous territory. Now Soobin is thinking about his lips. They’re soft and round, rubbed with gloss. He wonders what they would taste like, if they’d taste like his chapstick or the coffee he’d finished only a few moments ago. He also wants to know how Beomgyu kisses now, if he does it like he does everything ― slowly and thoroughly, taking his time ― or if he’ll be different. Pliant. Tender. Subject to whatever he lets Soobin do to him.

 _Dangerous_ territory.

“I was thinking.” Beomgyu pauses, sits up straighter and clears his throat. “I was wondering if you ― if you could kiss me.”

Soobin takes that with a swallow. For some reason, he’d already expected Beomgyu to say that ― and his heart lurches at the thought, begging him to say yes, to not refute what Beomgyu asked of him. But he doesn’t particularly know what’s going on and doesn’t particularly know what to do about it, so he leans back on his chair and gives Beomgyu the most incredulous look he can muster.

“Why― how?” he asks, hoping it conveys what he’s feeling clearly. 

Beomgyu swallows too, a tension descending over them that wasn’t previously there. Thick enough to tie his ribs in a cage and toss it to the moon. “I just,” Beomgyu says. “I just want it to be over with. I don’t want to wait for it anymore because the anticipation is _killing_ me, and I want you to take it.”

“You want me. You want me to take your first kiss?”

Beomgyu nods and the tip of his nose is red. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal, okay! Friends kiss each other _all_ the time!”

Beomgyu is right. They do. Friends kiss each other all the time and Soobin knows that. He doesn’t remember the countless times he’s made out with Taehyun drunk out of his mind and trying to get into the spirit of partying, but this isn’t Taehyun. This is Beomgyu.

And Soobin might have a crush on him. 

But then a wave of _want_ hits him. Beomgyu wants him to take his first kiss and Soobin, unfortunately, is kind of disgustingly in love. 

“Well,” Soobin sighs. “I guess there’s no harm in trying?”

He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He just wants to kiss Beomgyu, just once. And then he’ll let him go if he has to, but he wants to hold him close ― to find out what he tastes like, just this once.

He’s so fucked.

  
  
  


Logically, Beomgyu is aware this is a bad idea. But logic falls deaf the moment you enter the charming industrial interior of the campus Starbucks and find Yeonjun peacefully doing his job in an elegant looking black apron and a slew of ladies behind. Besides, every tragic thing he’s done in his life has been Yeonjun’s idea anyway so he doesn’t see why he shouldn’t ask for his help this time around.

“I don’t know how to tell him I like him,” Beomgyu waves his hands in explanation, following Yeonjun around as he scrubs the tables clean. “I drop hints furiously and he stands there like― _oh, hey Beomgyu-yah, you’re so nice to me!_ Hyung, am I a nice person? Does he think I’m a nice person? Is that why he won’t take me seriously?”

Yeonjun sighs. Being a fourth year ready to go headfirst into doctoral research has its drawbacks, Beomgyu thinks. He watches Yeonjun massage his back like he’s already crumbling to dust at such a young age and wonders if he’s been getting even a wink of sleep lately.

“Can we talk about this after my shift is over?” Yeonjun says, just to be mean. “I know you’re in love with Soobin but can that wait for at least twenty minutes more?”

“No,” Beomgyu smiles sweetly and shoots him a wink just to be annoying. Yeonjun is a lot of things, but he’s not immune to this. He scrunches his nose but a smile bleeds out anyway, cheeks tinted red with embarrassment. “You need to listen to me because I’m going home after treating you to dinner and all we do is talk about sad things in life at dinner so I need food for thought now.”

“Why don’t you like― tell him that? Tell him you like him?”

“And risk getting rejected?” he gapes. “Nope. I just want him to make the first move, why is it so difficult for him to see what I’ve been trying to tell him?”

For a second Yeonjun says nothing, just stands there with a frown. Beomgyu sees the dark circles underneath his eyes and lodges a reminder to himself to buy him some ice cream on the way back home. He works hard all the time, running back and forth from class to cafe to dorm to lab and so on. 

Then, Yeonjun tilts his head. “I know this might sound like a terrible ass fucking plan, but.” He pauses, momentarily. “I think I know what will make this situation an absolute fucking ride.”

  
  
  


So, here they are. Beomgyu blinks at the fact that Soobin just said _okay._

Truthfully, he’d expected a lot of reactions ― each one a little, a lot different from the last. And yet, here they are, Beomgyu blinking at Soobin from across the table in disbelief and Soobin staring determinedly at his cup like it has the answers to life in it.

“Are you― are you being forreal?”

“Sure,” Soobin says. “It’s just a kiss, right? Friends kiss each other all the time, like you said.”

 _Fuck what I said,_ Beomgyu wants to say. _Do you really want to?_ But he says nothing, just blinks more. He plays with his fingers, awkwardly ― hadn’t actually thought Soobin would accept his proposition so hadn’t cared enough to think about what happened _next_.

He opens his mouth, to say something or just drop the idea entirely, but Soobin beats him to it. “So,” he starts. “How do you want to do this?”

Soobin stands up and Beomgyu watches him walk towards him in confusion till he grabs Beomgyu’s wrist and pulls him up to his feet. Beomgyu yelps, falling into his chest as he searches for his shoulders to hold on to because of the loss of gravity. Then, he feels Soobin’s hands on his hips, steadying him. 

Beomgyu looks up, feels like he’s swallowed a thousand suns, and finds Soobin already looking back at him.

And he looks so _fond._

To be honest, Beomgyu doesn’t know if Soobin likes him like that. He doesn’t know if what’s there in between the two of them is something he’s just been imagining or if it’s something that actually exists. Because: one, Soobin is a quiet person. He doesn’t show what he’s ever feeling on his face and it’s taken Beomgyu an awfully long time to come to terms with what each one of his expressions, every little cue means. And two, despite everything that they do and all the ways they fit together ― he doesn’t really think Soobin likes him because that is exactly how Soobin is with everyone. Soobin’s a little in love with the world sometimes, and Beomgyu is a part of it. A part of his world. There have been so many instances, so many times in the middle of parties and at the cusp of dawn when Beomgyu has wanted to reach out, has wanted to pull Soobin against him and ask him if he’s imagining everything between them. But he’s a coward and Soobin has always been the braver one out of the two of them when it comes to communication. He’s a coward, so he watches Soobin kiss burn through his share of admirers after getting drunk enough and wishes it was him instead. 

Beomgyu swallows, staring at Soobin as he cups the underside of his jaw. Sometimes, when Soobin doesn’t have an expression on his face, Beomgyu thinks he looks intimidating, a bit scary. This is one of those times, and he can feel his heartbeat cease the closer he gets.

“We can do it like this,” Soobin says, ducks and in a moment of Beomgyu’s poor little heart malfunctioning to extreme degrees, he kisses him.

It’s not on the lips, just on the corner of his mouth, but he feels it all the same. A small gasp escapes him before he can contain it, embarrassed by how they’re standing here doing this in the middle of the afternoon, how the light is partial to Soobin’s features. Glowing, so bright, so blue, right over the slope of his nose in the middle of the fucking afternoon.

Soobin pulls away, eyes lidded. But Beomgyu can still feel his lips on the corner of his mouth and has to fight the urge to touch it. 

“Or,” Soobin says, glances down at his mouth and then back at his eyes. “We can do it like this.”

It happens slowly, like Soobin takes extra care in it.

Since he was a kid, Beomgyu had always thought first kisses that were dramatic would be more epic than simple ones. Of course he’d grown out of dramatic things after hitting adulthood, but he still wonders about it all the same. A first kiss to him was something he wanted to carry with himself for the rest of his life, he wants it to be memorable, however far-fetched the idea is. But the difference is, he no longer believes that for a moment to be memorable it has to be perfect. It doesn’t. 

It can be just this. Soobin, eyes still open, weaving his hands around Beomgyu’s waist to bring them closer, chest to chest; Beomgyu, hesitant, hands finding purchase on Soobin’s upper arm; their warm exhales, the dip of light between the space left in between them and then:

Then, a small sigh before Soobin presses his lips to Beomgyu’s. 

It’s soft, slow, something crafted with pre-directed care. Soobin holds Beomgyu close to him, and Beomgyu can feel his fingers tremble behind the back of his ears. Beomgyu closes his eyes shut and logs this moment, how it feels, how his fingertips tingle and twitch at the base of Soobin’s neck. They’re barely kissing, just trying to figure each other’s reactions out but it affects Beomgyu just that much more. 

Something clicks into place.

(―“Ask him to kiss you,” Yeonjun says. “That’s bound to get his brain cells working. Even the stupidest person around would know that no one asks someone to kiss them if they aren’t interested.”

Beomgyu gawks, thinks about a lot of questions to ask on the absurdity of the suggestion but settles on this one: “What if he still doesn’t get it, hyung?”―)

Soobin pulls away, breathes heavily, eyes trained on his lips. Beomgyu doesn’t know what to look at on his face, doesn’t know where to focus. He finds the apple of his cheek and lifts his hand to press there.

Something clicks into place, and this time they both lean in together.

 _This_ is a kiss. Soobin bunches Beomgyu’s sweater behind him in a knot, Beomgyu holds his face and pushes back harder. He’s never done this before, doesn’t know if he’s being sloppy, doesn’t know if it’s okay to kiss his bottom lip like he has always wanted to but Soobin doesn’t pull away or ask him to stop. Instead he moves closer to him to return the kiss just as hard, kissing Beomgyu’s lips open and slipping a tongue inside with confidence. It’s not just a kiss, all of a sudden. Beomgyu feels his insides warm, flip nonsensically, but he doesn’t pull away. He lets Soobin lick into his mouth, lets him turn them around and walk him to the table till they’re leaning over it and his back is lined over it. Beomgyu gasps when Soobin taps his thigh, pulls away to look back at him in a daze and understands immediately what Soobin wants him to do. 

He jumps up to sit on the table and Soobin knocks his knees away to get in between them. He holds Beomgyu’s face up and his ears are red, a blush high on his cheeks. He sounds breathless when he says, “God, you look so pretty.”

And Beomgyu doesn’t know what to say in response so he pulls him down and kisses him again and this time, it’s more desperate. This time, Soobin kisses with intention and Beomgyu pitches up against the line of his body ― he’s so fervent, so thorough that Beomgyu doesn’t even know what he’s doing before his hips start to move on their own accord. His legs wrap around the back of Soobin’s thighs on their own accord, he tries to lick into Soobin’s mouth like he’d felt Soobin do earlier on his own accord and it’s _something._

Beomgyu’s breathless when they part and Soobin is still leaving small kisses on his upper lip. He feels himself lock up when Soobin pulls away with the promise of one last kiss but ends up leaning for another over and over again. When he finally gives it up, he does so with a small laugh. He swipes his thumb over Beomgyu’s lips, digging it in and Beomgyu parts his mouth a little ― unconsciously ― for it.

“Hey,” Soobin smiles. Beomgyu is dizzy with how good he looks this close. Dizzy with the desire that courses through him and the realization that he just _kissed Soobin._ He just _kissed someone._ “How was that for a first kiss?”

Beomgyu, who still has his hands wrapped around Soobin’s neck, laughs into his mouth. “I don’t know hyung,” he says. “Might need a rerun to decide.”

(―“What will I do? What will I do if he doesn’t notice?”

Yeonjun smiles at him and it’s a little sad. Beomgyu feels pathetic all by himself anyway, he doesn’t need pity. But he takes it, with a bite of his lips and a look cast downwards, he takes it. “Then you spell it out for him. You have to, at some point.”―)

A moment doesn’t need to be perfect for it to be memorable. It just needs Soobin in it.

  
  
  


Beomgyu is brave in a lot of definitions of the word. He isn’t afraid to speak up when he feels something is wrong, never hesitates to do something with no forethought of safety if it means someone else can stay safe (however foolish that might be), he can digest gore with nothing more than an amused smile and popcorn melting on his tongue and watch horror without flinching or screaming that most of his friends are prone to. So, he likes to consider himself as the brave one of the lot. And he is, marginally, when it comes to people like Yeonjun and Soobin who are _not_. But, it’s when the world comes to this that he realizes that maybe he isn’t really as brave as he thinks he is. 

There’s nothing in the world that invokes more fear in him than telling Soobin that he loves him.

Soobin isn’t scary ― not by any means. He’s tall and gangly, has a dimpled gum-revealing smile and most of his love for things are encased safely in his need to physically deliver them. If no one else in the crowd, Beomgyu _knows_ Soobin won’t ever step back from holding his hand in public or hugging him when he’s afraid. Soobin _lives,_ and does so _vicariously,_ through affection. He has a lot of it inside him, perhaps more than he himself is aware of. He can be strict and he can be mad and straight to the point sometimes, but Beomgyu knows Soobin hasn’t got one mean bone in his body.

And that’s why Beomgyu is afraid, maybe. 

  
  
  


“Why did you suddenly decide to give your first kiss away?” Soobin asks on Friday.

He’s making bulgogi behind the counter, doing things only he knows how to do and won’t let Beomgyu touch. Beomgyu looks up from where he’s seated on the island and blinks at him. 

“What?”

Soobin looks at him, gloved hands pausing in the middle of washing the vegetables. His eyes are unfocused, like they want to look at Beomgyu but don’t know how to.

Beomgyu feels something in his heart drop at the thought, the inconsolable frantic whisper of: _does he know?_ Does he know Beomgyu likes him, does he know that it wasn’t that Beomgyu’s first kiss wasn’t important to him anymore but that he’d not want it another way? Did he manage to see through him after all?

But Soobin looks away, suddenly shy. “I mean,” he says. “We kissed. Kiss. We. Yeah, but like ― why did you suddenly decide it doesn’t matter anymore?”

Beomgyu doesn’t register the blush. All he can do is wonder if he’s been caught. “My first kiss? Why did I decide it doesn’t matter anymore?”

“Yeah. I mean, you waited all these years ― why not now?”

Because it wasn’t in vain. _Because I’m in love with you._

“Ah. I just felt like, you know, I don’t want to be bad or have no experience when I do it with someone I like and really, there’s no point in waiting ― you know?”

Soobin’s quiet for a while. He’s still cleaning the cabbage, but his fingers are working slower. Beomgyu doesn’t know why he feels it, all of a sudden, a guilt strong enough to topple him. But he does and he thinks he should apologise. For what, he doesn’t know. But he thinks he should, fully conscious of a delicate tension in the room that if tipped in the wrong direction can cause him his entire friendship with Soobin.

“Hyung, I―”

“Do you like someone, Beomgyu-yah?”

Beomgyu splutters. “What! _No._ ” But he’s always been easy to read and this is Soobin and he’s sure something shows on his face because Soobin huffs out a laugh, shakes his head and raises an eyebrow.

“I’m serious!” Beomgyu tries to cover for himself anyway. “I don’t like anyone, and if I did then I’d tell you.”

“You would?”

“I _would._ You’d be the first to know.”

Soobin is silent for a long time and Beomgyu doesn’t know what to make of it. Beomgyu sits on the counter, legs crossed, eyes looking everywhere but Soobin’s because he knows that if he looks at him Soobin will _know._ But Soobin won’t take his gaze off him, and it’s so steady, so whole, that despite the fact that Beomgyu hasn’t really done anything wrong it makes him feel like he has. Like he’s been caught in the act of doing it.

Then, Soobin exhales and peels his gloves off and lets them fall on the counter. Beomgyu can’t help it, he stares at his hands as he rinses them clean. The veins and the knuckles, the silver chain bracelet. His fingers, as they are, long and bony and larger than Beomgyu’s although Beomgyu’s aren’t small by any means. The thought makes him warm on the inside, heat rising to his cheeks and by the time he looks back at Soobin he’s void of any coherent thoughts.

Soobin switches the tap off and looks back at him, hesitates and begins making his way towards him.

For an odd moment, Beomgyu thinks Soobin knows. Soobin knows and he’s going to scream at him, ask him why he’d lied, tell him he couldn’t stand being in the same room as him. Then, Soobin is standing in front of him and looking him in the eye and Beomgyu doesn’t know how he could even think of Soobin as someone who would kick him out over a crush.

Soobin would probably do the opposite. Like, kick himself out or something.

“What?” Beomgyu asks, trying to sound as unbothered as possible but his uneven voice betrays him. 

“You know,” Soobin says. “I was wondering, did one kiss help you overcome your inexperience?”

It wasn’t just _one_ kiss. Soobin had kissed him over and over, and Beomgyu had let him. He’d kissed him right here, on the dining table beside him. He’d kissed hard enough that Beomgyu could feel the print of it on his lips even a week later. They hadn’t touched each other since, highly aware of the presence still lingering around them but it didn’t mean that it hadn’t happened because it had. They could toe around it, ignore it and move on like it was a one time thing but it had happened.

Beomgyu stays up hours past bedtime thinking about it, the memory fades the longer it goes but the feeling remains. He remembers Soobin’s hands on his waist, on his hips. He remembers the way Soobin’s lips had felt against his, soft and tasting something like the honey sauce he’d dumped over his pancakes that morning. 

“I―” Beomgyu’s at a loss for words. Soobin’s close, too close for comfort. As if noticing his turbulence at their proximity, Soobin bends lower and puts both his hands on either side of Beomgyu’s person. This close Beomgyu can see his lips, the mole on his neck. This close, Beomgyu can remember his body heat vividly. His eyes trickle down to Soobin’s lips and stay there, thoughts malfunctioning. “What do you― what―”

“Do you want me to teach you?” Soobin asks. “How you kiss someone you love, do you want me to show you?”

Beomgyu gapes, eyes widening.

A wave of hesitance passes over Soobin’s face. He blinks, muttering something close to _sorry fuck_ , and braces himself to step back but Beomgyu’s faster. He stops him, hands on his collar, turning his face back towards Beomgyu. 

“You mean you’ll kiss me again?”

Beomgyu trails his hands up Soobin’s collar, cusps his chin. The only person he’s ever kissed is Soobin, and yet the urge to do it again like he knows what he’s doing is overwhelming. 

“I would, yeah,” Soobin says, glancing at his lips. “You know, so you know what you’re doing when you kiss the person you love.”

 _Dumbass,_ Beomgyu wants to say. _You’re the only one for me._

He doesn’t know who he leans in first, except his eyes flutter close and Soobin’s lips are on his before he can even anticipate it. Soobin is good at kissing. He parts Beomgyu’s lips with ease, guides him even though it’s pretty obvious Beomgyu doesn’t know what he’s doing. All Beomgyu does is move his lips in the same rhythm of his heartbeat, turn Soobin’s face per will with a flick of his hands and let him deepen the kiss into something more tongue less lips.

He feels his heartbeat hitch higher and higher when Soobin pulls away with a pop and leans his forehead against his. He shakes his head, smiling vaguely. “Show me what you learned?” 

Utterly mortified, Beomgyu tries to gauge if Soobin actually means it but Soobin isn’t moving away and it doesn’t look like he’s joking.

Slowly, he keeps his hand on Soobin’s jaw and turns his face the way he thinks fits. It’s awkward. Beomgyu’s fumbling and stalling with the idea of pressing his lips to Soobin’s and Soobin is looking at him with half lidded eyes and a heavy gaze. Beomgyu exhales, counts to three and thinks ― they just kissed, it shouldn’t be that hard.

“Close your eyes,” Beomgyu asks, anyway. The weight of Soobin’s gaze keeps rendering him useless. 

Soobin does, obediently so. Beomgyu moves closer and waits for another moment. They’re so close now that he can count each one of Soobin’s eyelashes. Light dips in between them, hides in the corner of each curve of Soobin’s face, the slope of Beomgyu’s fingers. He can smell Soobin’s detergent, the scent of his shampoo and it feels familiar. Like comfort in its richest form.

He closes the distance.

It’s quiet at first. Beomgyu’s heartbeat is the only thing echoing in between them. It throbs so hard that he feels like it’s going to fly out of his mouth and into Soobin’s. Soobin is still beneath him, lips simply puckering close around Beomgyu’s when he kisses lightly over them. He moves back, hesitant and unsure and Soobin follows as if for more.

Beomgyu presses a finger on his bottom lip, pushing him back, spreads his legs to make way for Soobin to stand in between them. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he says and it comes out like a breathless whisper. 

“You’re good,” Soobin sighs, eyes still closed. “So good.”

And then he surges forward, pressing his lips to Beomgyu’s lips. He lets Beomgyu take the lead, dictating the way they move against each other. Beomgyu pulls Soobin closer and because he’s sitting on the island, he’s got a leverage against how tall Soobin is. Soobin puts his hands on the small of his back, head leaning up to kiss him more. Beomgyu tips his fingers at the back of his neck, fists his hair and messes it up. It’s slower this time but not with any less intention. Each breath of air, warm and hot and aware, makes Beomgyu move his body in anticipation. 

Anticipation of _what_ he doesn’t know, but he hopes it doesn’t end there. 

Soobin pulls away and this time he doesn’t return when Beomgyu chases after his lips. Instead, he pinches his nose and instantly pulls the mood back to how playful it was with ease. The tension breaks, Beomgyu rubs his nose and scowls at Soobin and Soobin smiles at him, all amused. He says, “We can do this later, if I do it now the we aren’t getting any lunch made.”

What Beomgyu hears is _we can do this later._ He makes a biting gesture at the hand Soobin had been raising to ruffle his hair, probably — he’ll never know ― and Soobin flinches, pulling it back saying something like _wow this dude will really bite the hand that feeds him_.

Soobin returns to work in a few moments, leaving Beomgyu staring at him from the island. He’s forgotten all that he’d meant to do that afternoon, choosing to stare at Soobin instead.

On normal days, Soobin is a menace to deal with but he’s looking like extra pain in the ass today. A black turtleneck and pyjamas would look shabby on anyone but him, Beomgyu decides.

Soobin looks up at him and Beomgyu takes his chances and winks.

He wonders how Soobin will react, if he’ll act confused or simply ignore it. What he gets instead is a bright, guttural laugh. What he gets instead is the promise that they’re going to continue this later. What he gets instead is this: no judgement, nothing but an air of casualness that always settles over them on afternoons they have a day off on.

Beomgyu knows why he’s doing this. Why he’s here, staring at Soobin making them both food. No matter how much he refutes it for himself, he knows he can’t deny it. He’d started it for this matter too, hoping Soobin would get what he meant through his kisses because he was too much of a coward to say it aloud. 

But why is Soobin doing this? What do his gazes mean? Beomgyu has always known how to read Soobin the best, and if he really tries this time around it’s not that hard to put a finger on why Soobin is still here, entertaining his whims. But hope is a careful, fragile thing. He cannot let it develop or let it fester, only for it to shatter cleanly in half when the time comes. 

“Hyung,” Beomgyu shakes his head, pushing his bangs off his forehead. “We’re good, right?”

Soobin swallows, the light that falls in his eyes makes him look ethereal. Something out of this world. “Of course,” he says. “We’re always gonna be friends, nothing can change that.”

Right. 

  
  
  


Soobin does not get the clue. And, like all things when it comes to them, it doesn’t stop there.

Kissing becomes an accidental habit. One day Soobin kisses the life out of him and the next it becomes routine. Beomgyu pouts about something that he’s been doing and Soobin kisses him to shut him up, Soobin feels bad about himself at three AM in the night and Beomgyu kisses him to sleep. It becomes a routine, kissing for comfort, kissing without reason, kissing because they want to. 

“That,” Yeonjun says, shoving pasta in his mouth without care about the sauce glistening on his lips, “is the weirdest way to say you’re together.”

“That’s the thing!” Beomgyu leans back on his chair, still sweating from painting one fourth of the walls in the messainaine from the morning. He tugs his shirt, airing himself, and frowns at Yeonjun’s pasta. “We aren’t! We aren’t together and we’re _still_ kissing! I don’t get it.”

Taehyun, who had been sipping his fruit beer and conveniently ignoring them, stops scrolling through his phone and looks up. “This is so ridiculous,” he says, raises an amused eyebrow at him. “What do you _mean_ you asked Soobin hyung to kiss you so as to inadvertently say you like him?”

“Yeonjun hyung’s idea.”

“Hey!” Yeonjun picks his gym sipper up and squeezes the body, spraying water at him. Beomgyu tries to dodge its line of attack but gets some drops on his face anyway, making him whine. “You were all over it. Plus, at least you know how he kisses now.”

And, well. That is true. He does know how Soobin kisses now, can still feel the way he’d held Beomgyu carefully last night and kissed him slowly as an apology for making dinner a tad bit spicier than Beomgyu can take after a whole day of him juggling his projects. He can still feel how soft his lips were, how careless and fleeting.

The thought makes him blush and Taehyun groans instantly.

“Oh my God,” he says. “He’s imagining it now.”

“I’m not! I’m just.” Beomgyu searches for the right word. “Thinking.”

Yeonjun kicks him under the table and Beomgyu goes for a rebuttal but it’s like Taehyun’s had it out for him since the morning because then he asks: _was hyung a good kisser at least?_ And Beomgyu needs to get out of here or he’ll end up strangling the two of them. He’s having a genuine crisis because Soobin won’t tell him he likes him and Soobin won’t stop kissing him either and Beomgyu’s getting used to it ― Beomgyu’s getting used to Soobin’s kisses, his hands on him, the almosts they’re getting to ― and well. Well, he needs to get out of here.

“Beomgyu,” Yeonjun calls out, after the two of them have had a good laugh at his expense. “You need to tell him, you know?”

“I―”

Taehyun interrupts before Beomgyu can reply properly. “Hyung,” he says. “You never know, really. And maybe Soobin hyung wants you to tell him you like him first too.”

Beomgyu kind of wants to cry. Instead, he nods. Outside, the sky is dark. It looks like it’s going to rain soon, and it’s formed oddly like a conclusion.

  
  


“Beomgyu,” Soobin says, waking him up with his hands in his hair. 

Beomgyu blinks his eyes open, hadn’t even realized he’d fallen asleep. They had been watching a movie in the morning, one of Soobin’s favourites ― he can’t remember what it was called, still too sleepy to tell. Soobin is sitting beside him, fingers massaging Beomgyu’s scalp with a small smile and Beomgyu thinks it’s been a while since he’s fallen asleep because he doesn’t remember them being like this at all. 

There are these moments in between since the day they kissed, the moments where Beomgyu doesn’t know where they stand. His heartbeat races at the look on Soobin’s face, at his proximity, but sinks when he realizes he doesn’t know what it means. That maybe he’s overthinking and giving meaning to what doesn’t exist in the first place again. 

Beomgyu looks away and stretches, limbs hurting in all odd places. He yawns. “What’s the time?”

“A little after two,” Soobin says. “You knocked out real fast and I was like, I’ve never seen someone sleep through an episode of Sweet Home before you.”

Right. The bloodshed. He remembers now and blanches, punching Soobin’s shoulder weakly and watching him laugh just to punch him back when he isn’t expecting it. Beomgyu thinks that either Soobin isn’t aware of how much strength he carries inside him or he’s very aware and pretends he isn’t to avoid responsibility but if possible, Beomgyu sinks further into the blanket at the punch and groans with the pain that pulses there.

“Hyung, what the fuck?” 

“Sorry, sorry,” Soobin says, in between fits of laughter and tries to help Beomgyu up. “Want some water?”

Soobin hands him a glass like he knew he’d say yes and Beomgyu takes it from him, gulping it down in one go. The afternoon is quiet paired with the faraway croaking of crickets. He can still see his mac lying at the edge of the bed where Soobin probably disposed of it after he was done watching. It’s when Beomgyu looks at it carefully that he notices what caught his attention in the first place: Soobin’s legs tangled with his own, big feet draped over his smaller one, toes subconsciously playing with his. The idea of it makes him tremble, a little, and his heart peaks with it.

He turns to him and Soobin takes the glass from his hands, sets it on the table, then pulls him closer by his chin and plants a small kiss on his mouth.

“Sorry,” he says, when he lets go. Beomgyu blinks his eyes open, realising that they were still closed, and stares. “Just― you looked pretty.”

“I just woke up.”

“Yeah. Still.”

Beomgyu smiles, stomach fluttering. He pulls Soobin closer again and _this?_ This is new too. The slow kisses, a red ribbon tied around his lungs. Beomgyu’s learnt, in the ages between, that Soobin kisses like he means it ― like he’s trying to convey something he has no words for. He nips and bites, pulls away and kisses his jaw and Beomgyu thinks he can let this be, let him be. If it’s like this, he wants it to be forever.

Somehow, Beomgyu is pushed down on his back and Soobin is hovering over him and they’re still kissing. The silver chain he gifted Soobin on his birthday last year falls on his clavicle, settles on the column of his throat ― cold and fleeting. Beomgyu feels each jut of the metal dig in his skin, shivers with the way it moves when Soobin kisses lower and lower, till he reaches the side of his neck and bites harder there. Beomgyu arches up, hands tangling in his hair and pressing his face down on the bite and Soobin soothes it with his tongue, kissing over it.

This is new too, the things that almost happen.

Soobin looks up, a question simmering in his eye and Beomgyu doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to but he looks back with a plea caught on his lips. 

“You’ve never done any of this,” Soobin says. It’s not a question, so he doesn’t answer, waits for the question when it comes. “Have you never touched yourself?”

A blush blooms on his cheeks but before he can rebut with a sharp snap, Soobin bites the hollow between his collarbones and he throws his head back with a gasp. “I’ve―“ he says, breathing hard. “I’ve touched myself before.”

Admitting it feels horrifying. Beomgyu feels embarrassment course through him in waves but then Soobin is running his hands over the side of his body, hooking his fingers in the hem of his pants to drag him closer ― hip to hip. And Beomgyu, he’s at a loss for words. He’s never done this before, and he wonders how many times Soobin has for him to be so good at it.

The thought brings an irrational wave of envy in his mind. He wonders who has been here before him, wonders if it’s happened when he was in their flat just a door away. 

Soobin kisses the thoughts close. He kisses his bottom lip and then his upper one, slow and steady, says, “I can hear you thinking stupid things. I don’t hook up, not often ― I’ve slept with people, like, on two occasions last year Beomgyu, I’m a biochem major.”

A breathless giggle leaves his mouth and he closes his eyes, feeling Soobin’s gaze on his face. Feeling so pretty in his hands. “People?” Beomgyu asks, just to be a little shit. “Plural?”

Soobin laughs but it’s with a little tsk. “Brat,” he says. 

Beomgyu can feel himself rousing up more when Soobin hooks his fingers under his chin and kisses him again, opens his mouth to shove his tongue inside and swirls it within. His ears ring with the reminder of Soobin’s hands, sneaking under his shirt and he clasps his own behind Soobin’s back, digs his fingers over his shoulder blades, just to hold him close. He feels like the stream under a cliff. Warm water undisturbed till a storm takes over. 

“You like that, hmm?” Soobin says. His voice is so soft, but so immediately urging and that Beomgyu arches up at the lint of it. “You’re hard.”

And he is. Beomgyu is ashamed of the way he’s not even coy about it, on his way to being fully hard with a kiss drunk smile on his face and nothing but a simple, “You started this.”

Soobin kisses him. He loves it when Soobin kisses him. “That I did,” he says, sits back and slips his hands under Beomgyu’s pyjamas. “Is this okay? Do you want me to stop?”

Like this, Soobin is sitting in between his legs and Beomgyu is lying back on the bed with each bit of his body trapped in the kind of wait he’s never felt before. Soobin is taller, bigger than he is, and it’s evident in everything they do ― the way his hands cover the entirety of his hips, drawing circles on his abdomen that has Beomgyu biting his lips to prevent the cry threatening to leak out. Beomgyu likes how that makes him feel, safe and sound on good days; warm and pliant, on days like these. 

“Yes,” he says. “It’s okay. Please.”

And he doesn’t even have the time to take a second to think before Soobin is pulling the pyjamas off him, leaving him in nothing but his underwear and a shirt ―

A shirt, he notices, is Soobin’s right when its owner does apparently.

Soobin’s eyes narrow. “Is that mine? Again?”

Beomgyu doesn’t know why he does it. He likes Soobin’s clothes, despite how much fun he makes of Soobin for never burning through his wardrobe, he likes the oversized sweatshirts and how they make him feel. He likes that they’re too big on him, that they still smell like Soobin, a mix of lavender, lemon and detergent. He’s also sort of noticed Soobin’s eyes on him when he does, maybe for even longer than Soobin himself has, and it makes him want to do it more. And right now, he can feel that same gaze that has been following him around the apartment since the day they kissed two weeks ago and he knows he’ll do it again, over and over, if it makes Soobin look at him like this.

“T’was in my closet,” Beomgyu mumbles, punctuated by a tiny sigh when Soobin trails his hands up the waistband of his underwear just to ruck his shirt up. Now, hands on bare skin and so warm he feels it burn, Soobin trails them down from the middle of his ribs to the hollow of his belly and Beomgyu lets out a tiny whine. It’s getting hotter, too hot, for absolutely no reason. 

“How do my shirts keep landing in your closet?” Soobin says, leaning down and kissing his chin. “Do you purposely take them?”

“What if I do?”

“Yes,” Soobin finds the arc of his chest, the pad of his nipples, and presses. Beomgyu feels his mind wipe itself clean, heartbeat ringing in his ankles. “Or no.”

“Hyung.” Beomgyu feels his eyes prick a little and understands that this, what he’s feeling, is desperation. “What are you doing?” 

“Were you wearing my shirt then?” Soobin asks. “When you touched yourself, were you wearing my shirt?”

The question brings in the memories of the nights he’s lied awake, in his room, feeling a little lonely and a little curious ― the time he’s spent too long in showers, sneaking a hand down to get himself off wondering how Soobin would do it if he were to. “I’ve,” Beomgyu starts, pausing with embarrassment. Soobin senses his hesitation and brings himself back up over to kiss Beomgyu, lean his forehead against his, and asks again. This time Beomgyu can’t stop the words from coming out. “I have, sometimes. I’ve thought of you.”

Soobin lets out a tiny groan, let’s his face fall from Beomgyu’s forehead to kiss the tip of his ears. “How? How do you think of me?”

Beomgyu wonders if he should for a beat. It passes and then he’s pushing Soobin back until they’re both sitting, legs tangled in each other’s. He smiles, he can’t help it, and bites his lips. “Like this,” he says, pushing Soobin down flat on the bed. 

Realistically, he knows he shouldn't try to because he’s never done this before, and he doesn’t know if he’s going to be good enough or if he’s going to scare Soobin away. Impulse, however, listens to nothing except its own self and Beomgyu tugs at Soobin’s pants and pulls them off. He’s hard too, Beomgyu notices and raises an eyebrow. Soobin simply leans back on his elbows, shakes his head and bites his lips. He opens his mouth, as if trying to say something but Beomgyu beats him to it.

“Will you let me show you?” he asks. “Will you let me show you how I imagine it? You?”

“Fuck,” Soobin let’s all reserves go and lies back down, letting Beomgyu do what he likes. Despite having never done this before, Beomgyu finds he quite loves the feeling of being in control ― of having someone at the mercy of his fingertips, of watching each one of his touches drive Soobin up the wall. It makes his nerves sing with anticipation, a grin on breaking out on his face.

“If you’re done gawking,” Soobin says, “then maybe you can.”

“Whose gawking?” Beomgyu pushes him back when he starts to lean up again and his fingers tremble, but he still reaches out to trace the shape of Soobin’s cock over the fabric of his sweatpants. Soobin, for the first time that afternoon, looks away from the sight and at the mirror beside his bed. And Beomgyu ― well, he’s looking at Soobin. He stops midway and rakes his fingers over the hem, pressing over the outline of his dick to give just enough friction that he can take away. Then he pulls his cock out.

It’s a moment of bravery on his part, honestly, but Beomgyu thinks that Soobin has the best dick he’s ever seen. Maybe he should be a little more embarrassed right now, considering he’s holding someone else’s dick in his hand but there’s newfound confidence surging through him and Soobin is trembling under his touch. He wraps a hand around its base and strokes it, once twice, before spitting into his hand to make the slide easier. He’s going to regret not talking about this before but for now he presses the slit of Soobin’s cock and jacks him off, flicking his wrist the way he knows feels good.

“Are you― _fuck_ ,” Soobin stutters and there’s a strange feeling to be felt here, curling in his guts. “Are you sure you’ve never done this before?” 

Beomgyu smiles, drags the precum down his shaft and says, “I’m sure.” 

_What are the odds of freezing if he were to proceed further?_ Beomgyu thinks, he’ll never know if he doesn’t try.

He leans down and takes Soobin’s dick in his mouth and Soobin gasps, curves off the sheets and digs his hands into Beomgyu’s hair. It hurts a little, the way he’s pulling at the strands and pushing him down, but Beomgyu’s far too gone with the taste ― a little bitter, a little musky ― in his mouth to care. He licks a stripe up and it fattens even more so. Beomgyu wonders what it would feel like inside him, wonders, while kissing over the tip, if it’ll reach deeper than his fingers do. The thought makes him squirm and with Soobin’s cock in his mouth, so big, heavy with the early onset of release he thinks he wants a trial run.

But Soobin pulls him off his dick and up to his mouth before he can nip at it catlike in suggestion. The energy is all different now, charged with something else, something more. Beomgyu can feel Soobin’s hands on his shirt, under it, playing with his nipples and tweaking them and he can feel himself fall into the same pliant space he was in before. He lets Soobin take the semblance of control he’d regained. It’s push and pull, push and pull. Beomgyu’s lying flat on his back and his shirt is somewhere on the floor and Soobin is raking his eyes over his body.

Beomgyu’s never felt more naked.

Breathing just as hard as Soobin, he leans up on his elbows to put a hand under his cheek and kiss him again. The tension grows, thickens, until Soobin is pushing him down and hovering over him. He kisses him silly while taking his pants off. Beomgyu’s naked down there but he’s still wearing Soobin’s shirt, squirming underneath him and Soobin is looking at him like he’s never seen anything like this sight before. Soobin takes his pants off a few seconds later, but he doesn’t let Beomgyu take his shirt off ― pins his hands above his head when he tries to.

“Hy’ng,” Beomgyu says, between gasps because Soobin has resumed kissing him, frantically so, mapping his throat out with kisses and bruises equally, “what?”

“Keep them on,” Soobin says, pulling him closer by his hips. It’s weird to feel him so close, so naked ― so weird. “Keep them on and―”

He doesn’t complete, surges to kiss Beomgyu once again. His hold on Beomgyu’s hips keeps him down and Beomgyu decides he likes that, likes Soobin like this, holding him so close with nothing to separate them except his shirt. He wants to rip it off too, feel Soobin as close as he can, but Soobin won’t let him. So, he stays there, gasping and crying out moans he’d be embarrassed to let out in any other situation. When he tries to reach for Soobin’s hair, back, anything to hold on to, Soobin pushes his wandering hands down and entangles his fingers with his. 

It’s everything, rush coursing through him in slices. He feels each touch, each breathe, every little drag of tongue on skin with heightened pressure and cries out when Soobin moves a little and their hips align again differently, the friction of Soobin’s cock on his making him feel what he’s never felt before. He’s imagined this, imagined the hot drag of Soobin’s mouth on his skin and his hands on his dick but it’s nowhere close to the real thing. It’s nowhere close to the heat building up inside him, the way it screams in his guts when Soobin reaches down with one hand, mouth still attached to his, and takes both their dicks in his hand. 

It hurts, the pleasure grows, and it hurts. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, thinks he’s probably punching drawn out, incoherent and incessant _please, please, harder._ He needs it out, needs the release and searches for it ― desperately bucking up into Soobin’s hands. 

It feels like nothing’s ever felt before, so intimate, so close ― so terrifying. Soobin licks into his mouth and they part, he bites his lips and rests his forehead on his own and Beomgyu’s crying ― coming before he even knows what’s happened. They’re still panting into each other’s mouths, and Soobin is still fully hard. Beomgyu looks down, almost moans at the sight when he sees Soobin stroke their cocks together, his having not gone down yet. Soobin’s dick looks so _big_ in comparison to his even if Beomgyu isn’t small by any means and it’s making him swallow feebler pleads, bite back the same words that threaten to spill out over and over again.

_Won’t you fuck me, hyung? Don’t you want to be inside me?_

It’s an incoherent thought but Beomgyu spreads his knees wider and Soobin strokes them both faster and he’s coming again with something short of a scream, Soobin’s name on his tongue. Soobin groans, louder, and then he’s coming too, spilling into his hands and all over Beomgyu’s shirt.

A shirt that’s his.

Now fully spent and bordering on over-sensitive, Beomgyu hisses when Soobin’s fingers touch the head of his cock and Soobin gets the cue and lifts himself off him halfway through. He collapses in the junction of his neck, breathing heavily and Beomgyu can’t help the laugh that escapes him.

“What―“ he asks, helpless, the satiation left behind turning his limbs into pudding. The rush is bleeding out slowly, so slow that Beomgyu is hyperaware of each second that passes in between. He can hear the otherness of life returning to him. The quiet afternoon comes back with each exhale, the sunlight from the window, pooling over their frames, the sound of crickets in the middle of the day. “What did we just do?”

Soobin picks himself up from where he’d buried his face into Beomgyu’s shoulders and blinks. “I,” he says. “I’ve no idea.”

This wasn’t supposed to happen, Beomgyu thinks in hindsight. He can feel each place Soobin touched burn with the reminder of it, hear him whisper pretty things in his ears. His insides turn, a smile on his face that had something to do with how Soobin’s fingers are still digging into the side of his waist. 

“I mean,” Soobin says. “At least you got some experience.”

Beomgyu frowns. “What?”

“You wanted to do this so you had some knowledge on hand before you tried it out with someone you liked, right?”

Soobin wiggles his eyebrows at him like he’s teasing him, like he knows a secret Beomgyu doesn’t. Beomgyu feels his heart drop. Suddenly the hands on hips feel cold, the weight of the gaze on his feels like a disaster waiting to happen. Beomgyu stares at him, dread settling in his guts.

“You think I asked you to kiss me because I want to do it with someone I like?”

Soobin shifts, and his expression betrays no sense of hurt. “Didn’t you?” 

For a long time, Beomgyu remains silent. It doesn’t make sense to him, the tension in the room at the moment falls weightless on his shoulders. He blinks at Soobin, traces his jaw with his fingers.

“I,” Beomgyu hesitates, for just a second longer. “I guess I did,” he says. “Thank you.”

He doesn’t let Soobin kiss him when he moves and maybe that was a mistake, because they should’ve talked then ― should’ve cleared up the misunderstanding.

But Beomgyu doesn’t let Soobin kiss him and Soobin doesn’t chase after Beomgyu when he leaves and they’re both equally hurt, equally terrified at the idea of what went down and what it’s made of them. Beomgyu sits in the shower, picking his nails and trembling with no foresight of the future. Soobin lies back down on Beomgyu’s bed, falls asleep and decides he needs to run before Beomgyu can catch him.

  
  
  


There’s an uneasy tension around their apartment after that. It isn’t like the one that had blanketed all the other times, it’s something uglier. It gives Beomgyu a headache at his best, the awkward silences and fleeting glances. Soobin doesn’t make a move to talk to him unless Beomgyu prompts first and yesterday, he’d even dropped a glass when Beomgyu had tried taking it from his hands.

It’s weird. The longer Soobin stays at the lab the more paranoid he gets. 

There’s only one conclusion to come from this after all. There’s only one thing to say, only one truth emerging from it.

Soobin found out. Beomgyu thought he hid it well but Soobin found out. He wonders if he should’ve never, if the signs he’d thought were right were _so, so wrong._ He wonders when Soobin figured it out, if it had been when Beomgyu was desperately bucking into his hands or if it was after, when he’d casually mentioned experience and Beomgyu had bolted like his life depended on it.

He wants to take it back. Every time he sees Soobin in the apartment and yet still so far away, he wants to take it back. He wants to mention what happened, to prick the silence apart and push something into it. To close this daunting, gaping space between them that resists each of his efforts.

But Soobin is always so far away, always busy, always on the phone. He makes dinner and eats in his room, he wakes up before Beomgyu can and Beomgyu walks into the kitchen, dressed in Soobin’s shirt, to find a steaming hot plate of ramen already waiting for him but no sight of Soobin anywhere around it.

The thing about misunderstandings, or the lack of communication thereof, is that the more you let it fester, the wider the chasm gets. There were stories he heard as a kid; relationships he’s seen fall apart under the weight of broken promises with little to no resolutions. 

Maybe the real reason why he’d stewed of his first kiss was because he never wanted to be in this situation. It had been a conscious decision on his part. He’d never kissed people in high school despite having a chance to do so, arguing with himself that there wasn’t anyone he liked enough to make a move. At the dimly lit parties in colleges and the many people he’s met throughout the years he could consider being more with, he simply didn’t want to.

It had been partly because he met Soobin, but the other part of it always was and would be that he could shake off the memory of love if something went wrong, shake it off and put it somewhere in the corner of his mind he could close till he needed to open it again.

But tangibility was something he could not peel off his skin. 

By tangibility, he means the sense of Soobin’s touch on him now that he knows what it’s like. The way Soobin caresses his lips after he kisses too hard, the way Beomgyu still has the hickey Soobin bit into his collarbones as a reminder of what had happened that he carries around everywhere with him.

And Soobin won’t even look at him, won’t even look at him.

Sometimes he wonders if it was that despicable, that horrifying to have done something like that with Beomgyu. He tries to understand, lies paralysed in fear in the middle of the night or cries into Soobin’s hoodies when he takes them off to shower. He doesn’t get it, he doesn’t get any of this.

Soobin had wanted it. Soobin had wanted him too.

Then―

  
  
  


They should’ve talked. 

They should’ve because Beomgyu is sitting in starbucks, watching Yeonjun smile at the students who come in and go in utter mortification. No matter how much he showers, he can’t rub the weight of Soobin on his body away. Everything feels tasteless, everything feels weird. Beomgyu wants to go back home, wants to fall into Soobin’s person like he used to before all of this happened but he doesn’t know how to ask for it, doesn’t know where they stand anymore.

It’s making him miserable.

And Soobin has stopped coming back home too. He texted him, the first few days he skipped. **_Sorry, Gyu-yah, caught up in the lab ― can’t make it_** ** _😭_** to **_Brb tomorrow, okay? I can’t today_** to **_Listen, I’m lounging in Hyuka’s dorm for the time being since it’s closer to the lab and I need to be there the earliest for the next couple of weeks._** Each time Beomgyu has replied with more questions, all passively answered, and Soobin has still not shown a sign of life at home. It’s been two weeks since Beomgyu last saw him and he’s miserable because it’s never been like this before. It’s _never_ been like this before. 

He thinks a tear catches in his eye when Yeonjun sighs and drags the chair opposite to him to settle down. Beomgyu can’t stop thinking if it’s because of what he did, wakes up in the middle of the night to barely hold himself back from calling Soobin and crying. _I’m sorry,_ he wants to say. _I won’t look at you anymore. I won’t even be around when you are. Please come back home, please. Please._

“Did you try calling him?” Yeonjun asks.

“I did. Yesterday, even. Called the lab, said he was unavailable.”

It makes Yeonjun frown, like there’s something here he doesn’t get but Beomgyu doesn’t see what’s so confusing about this. They crossed a line they shouldn’t have and now Soobin regrets it. Maybe he knows that Beomgyu is in love with him and maybe he thinks he’s led him on and doesn’t know how to let him down easy and all such noble bullshit he’s capable of thinking. Beomgyu just wants this to be over, he can’t stand the empty house, can't look at the door to Soobin’s room without crying. 

“You said he initiated it, right?” Yeonjun tries again. “This is so weird, Soobin isn’t the kind of person to do something like that.” 

He isn’t, which is why he’s holding himself somewhere in guilt. Maybe he thinks he’s obligated to like Beomgyu back, maybe he thinks there’s something wrong with him because he doesn’t. 

“He won’t come back, hyung,” Beomgyu says, voice cracking. “He won’t come back.”

He doesn’t know how he finds himself in Yeonjun’s embrace, doesn’t know how long he cries for even though he’s sure all the other students here are looking at him oddly. Yeonjun promises him he’ll take him out next Saturday to drink the loss away but Beomgyu doesn’t want this to be a loss. Out of all things he thought he would have to let go of, one day, inevitably, Soobin wasn’t one of them.

But there are answered texts in his pocket, an empty room back home. 

  
  
  


Two days later, Beomgyu finds himself in Soobin’s room once again.

He keeps coming here. Every time he returns home after a long day, he clicks open Soobin’s door and expects to see him there. He stands there, raking his eyes over the still dark room glowing an eery, vacant blue and feels his breath shudder on its way out ― feels his chest ache and fall. It’s become routine, trying to avoid reminders of Soobin and inadvertently following it back home. Can he even ignore it? Can he, at the end of the day, look at himself in the eye and say that just because he isn’t thinking about Soobin doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss him? Can he do that when his fingers still tremble with the urge to reach out and bring Soobin back, when his body still aches in every place he’s been touched by him. When even now, two weeks later, all he can do is _miserably_ crawl back to Soobin’s room and sleep on his bed wearing his hoodie and wish he would come home already.

He can’t. Not thinking about someone in the act of the action means you are thinking about them.

And Beomgyu is always thinking about Choi Soobin.

He stands there, in the middle of his room, for a long time. Then, for some reason, he does what he’s been avoiding since the beginning. He goes to Soobin’s drawer, the first one on his desk, the one Soobin had yelled at him for when he’d tried to open a few weeks ago. He pulls it open because _what’s the worst that can happen?_ He doesn’t really know what he’s expecting in there, but what he does see isn’t what he’s expecting either.

There’s a diary, A5, yellow spine and grey recycled paper cover. Over it is a letter. He picks the letter first, thinks ― what _difference_ does it make? 

He remembers Soobin giving him a letter on his last birthday too, along with a bracelet he’d lost soon after. He hadn’t meant to, but he had. But he still has the letter, stored neatly in a box of his most treasured memories in his closet. This one is the same, trimmed corners decorated cutely with black emo-punk sweaters like Soobin thinks that is his style. He smiles and it comes out a little wet, runs his fingertips over the edges and pulls it open.

It’s not much, really. Soobin usually has a lot to say but there are just five lines here. His eyes land on the concert ticket for BTS’ Seoul show and he feels his heart stutter, tremble at the sight of it. 

_Beomgyu,_

_Scrapbook! I know that the last time I gave you something ornamental you lost it in weeks and I felt very bad about it until I realised that is such a Beomgyu thing to do so now we’re here, this year I’m going to give you this scrapbook. I don’t know why but I remember that you still have my letter, that you’ve thrown away my bracelet but you still have my letter. So I think this is a thing you will treasure more, you’ll be more careful with this one. These have everything! The polaroids we took as freshmen and the low quality photo booth pictures that went off as soon as Taehyun accidentally pushed you over my lap and everything else I could find that might mean something to you. Kai helped me decorate most of it so credit goes to him too. I hope you like this, and don’t lose this or I will really cut your hand off this time. Have a happy twenty-third Beomgyu-yah, I hope we stay friends till we’re old and grey, I think I actually like having you in my life now. How sickening. _

_― Soobin_ _❤️_

A beat, then two, and Beomgyu can see the drops of tears erode the letter in various places with full clarity now. They were friends, they were friends and Beomgyu had to go and ruin it ― had to act on his feelings. They were friends and Beomgyu had to make it worse. They were friends and Soobin made him this scrapbook, it’s pages soft to touch, stuck with polaroids worth three years of history down to the last page and small scribbles about how each moment felt in the lifetime of things and Beomgyu let it _go._ All for a selfish desire, Beomgyu let him go.

 _I’d rather have you in my life as a friend than not at all, hyung._ The tears come down so hard he thinks he’ll begin choking with the force of it if he doesn’t stop crying but he can’t stop, not when Soobin made him an early birthday present and noticed what meant to him was the letter not the bracelet. Not when Soobin is miles away and Beomgyu is in his room, in his sweater, losing the scent of what it was like to have Soobin around him. 

He falls to his knees, fists clenched over the scrapbook in his lap. He’s ready to do everything, anything, to bring Soobin back.

  
  
  


Therefore, the difference, he realises, is a kind of desperation that shoves its hand in your ribs and rips your heart from its place. 

  
  
  


(Yeonjun finds Soobin outside his home at two am, right when he’s coming back from the lab. He sighs, kneels down in front of him and gently knocks his head. Soobin blinks awake, smelling like lavender and lemon and detergent, and stares at Yeonjun. “Hyung,” he says. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Yeonjun takes him home, runs him a bath and makes him ramen. He sits him down on the table and chooses to answer then. “You do know what you’re doing,” he says.

“What?”

“You’re running away.”)

  
  
  


Three weeks later is when Beomgyu gets the call. At first, he doesn’t understand what’s happening. The cheery ringtone wakes him up from the nap he’d taken, fallen asleep on the couch in the living room because sleeping in his own room is too difficult without having someone around. He’d tried asking Taehyun to come over but there had been no free days and he’d had a lot of night shifts and Beomgyu is a lot of things but he isn’t insensitive to pressure, so he’d said it was okay and called it a night. 

But he can’t fall asleep by himself in a bed far too big to be just for him, so he chose the couch. And it was apparently the wrong decision because by getting startled with the ringtone, he’d rolled off it and landed straight on the carpet. The moment is so hilarious it makes him hurt on the inside even as he laughs.

The emotion dies when he swipes to answer without checking the ID and presses the phone to his ears.

“Beomgyu-yah,” Soobin slurs. “I miss you.”

Beomgyu’s heart stops. Three weeks of radio silence. Three weeks of zero activity. Three weeks of nothing, no exchanges, no words, no communication ― and now this. It takes him two seconds to blink and understand what situation he is in, and the realisation roots him to the spot. His heart plummets straight into his stomach, jaw cracking loose and familiar wash of tears nearing the back of his eyes.

“Hyung?” he asks, and his voice is so small. “Soobin hyung?” He pulls the phone away and stares at the screen, and sure enough ― it is Soobin. The bunny emoji, the stupid little heart. The one person he’s missed more than he’s ever missed anything in the world.

“Beomgyu, I miss you so much.” He hears Soobin cough on the other end, hears a few yells to go steady and _not drink so much._ “I miss you so much I thought you were right beside me right now but it wasn’t you and it felt like a dream because it was so real but it wasn’t you ― I miss you, I miss you so much.”

He has no sense of what’s happening. He understands nothing in the moment. “Where are you, hyung?”

“Do you understand, Beomgyu?” Soobin slurs again and this time there’s a bang, a panicked scream and Beomgyu wants to yell at him to be still, to be steady because he knows he’s hit the floor. “Ah,” he cries, into the receiver. “Ah I fell down. I always fall down when you aren’t around to catch me. I miss you so much.”

Beomgyu’s lips tremble, eyes flutter shut. “Where are you hyung? Why―”

“Because I miss you! I called you because I miss you. I miss your voice, I miss your face. I miss everything about you and I― I am. I’m tired of running away.”

“Why did you?” Beomgyu bites his lips, and there’s an anger inside him he didn’t know he had. _Why did you run away, then? If you hated it so much, why couldn’t you just tell me?_ “Where are you, hyung?”

“I’m with my friends. Drank some ― something. I’m not drunk though.” He hears another crash. “I wish you were here. I miss you. I want to hold your face.”

“I―”

“I remember what it’s called now, Beomgyu. I remember your song.”

“Hyung?” and Beomgyu hopes he’s drunk enough to not hear how his voice cracks, how he finally begins crying like a petulant kid at the brink of being forgiven. “What are you saying?”

Soobin’s voice cracks. “It’s called _Officially Missing You_ , isn’t it? I’m sorry I didn’t remember.”

“It doesn’t mat―”

“I miss you when you’re with me. I miss you when you’re right there, I miss you when I kiss you, I keep seeing your face everywhere. I keep looking at myself in the mirror and reaching for you ― I miss you so much, I miss you _so much_ my heart hurts.”

For a second, he sounds so sober that Beomgyu stares at the television in front of him, stricken. Then he starts sobbing, so loud Beomgyu can hear him through the phone. “I’m sorry,” he says, over and over again. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I depend on you so much, I’m sorry you always have to see the worst in me, I’m sorry for walking out on you, I’m sorry for continuously running away and even this call that I won’t remember in the morning, but you will. You’re always left with the remainders of my mess and I’m sorry you have to clean up after me. You do more for me than I can even think of doing for you.”

“Hyung,” Beomgyu cries, too. Shoulders shaking and eyes wet and furious. “Where are you?” 

“I’m right here, Gyu-yah. I’m right here.”

With a sickening crunch in a way he anticipated, Beomgyu hears the phone click shut. 

  
  
  


When Soobin says he loves Beomgyu, he means this.

He means the first time they met each other. On a Sunday right before his life changed, Beomgyu walked into the dorm with a knock interrupted halfway through and a bandana under his forehead and Soobin thought _oh._ Oh, hand still on the knob, eyes widening halfway through. Oh, bright light filling their tiny dorm room in a small sigh. The space between the two bunk beds and their study desks underneath it increases marginally at the sight of the person he has to share it with. Beomgyu’s slightly shy gaze quickly averting to find something else to latch on to. Oh, _this is my roommate._

He means the way Beomgyu fits in the pieces of his life easily. Soobin had always thought he’d have a tough time engaging with roommates, would’ve a tough time fitting in at all. But Beomgyu sat there, looking timid by his desk, and Soobin got over himself enough to ask him who he was, where he was from. Somehow the little conversation sparked something bigger than he could name, somehow it went from a simple introduction to talking about homes and dreams and the things you’ve always wanted to do but couldn’t. Somehow, without knowing, Beomgyu had carefully knocked down the doors to his heart and settled in there ― each passing glance in the night, a smile sent his way because suddenly, there were jokes they shared among just the two of them. When morning came, they were still new friends but they went down to the guide together, had breakfast together and thought maybe they could meet up for lunch too.

He means that when he thinks about the future, he can’t do so without keeping Beomgyu in it. He means that sometimes he wakes up and finds Beomgyu in his bed and he can’t help but smile into the nape of his neck, tie his hands around his waist and pull him closer. That the books and clothes strewn across their dorm room, the decors on the wall, the pictures of Toto on the fridge, were all things that helped Soobin make a home so far away from home. Helped him treasure a place he’d previously held no form of attachment for.

Unknowingly, or perhaps knowingly, he means that Beomgyu cracked open his shell not just for himself but for everyone else too.

And that is the core of it, unfortunately. When Soobin says he loves Beomgyu, he means this: he has never depended on anyone half as much as he does on Beomgyu, and the thought of it scares him. 

Trains rattle around the city each night, metros blink in the distance. A golden layer of city light pauses and exhales in fumes, settling neatly over the evening fog. Soobin clutches his heart and means, from the bottom of it, that he loves Beomgyu so much his heart is full of it. But that means there’s no place to set it down, there’s no place to keep it and so he lets it go.

Beomgyu is the home Soobin has made for himself. And that’s probably where the problem lies, or at least a part of it. Beomgyu is the home Soobin has made for himself but Soobin has never felt at home in himself. He knew longing, he knew yearning – but he didn’t know _belonging._ And that was the other part of the problem. He didn’t know belonging, so he didn’t have a home. Not even when it was right where it should be, when it was waiting for him with open arms.

Beomgyu was a tether, an anchor, and Soobin was always pulling away.

  
  
  
  


Soobin wakes up to a different ceiling in the morning. 

The light dissipates in million little rays when it reaches his face, tinted in the blue, black and white of Kai’s room. He clutches his head, groaning, the brightness a little blinding for him to take so early. Blinking, he tries to focus on something.

It’s dead silent, somewhere in the eerie hours of the morning. Blue embers glow mirthlessly in every peak of furniture in the room and Soobin’s eyes dart between each one of them, burning from the effort it takes to stay awake. The clock on the wall opposite to the bed reads _five am._

He realises, all at once, that this is another day.

He sinks deeper under the blankets, wishing to find at least some semblance of awkward comfort. His guts churn, but he doesn’t feel like puking them out any time soon so he tries taking his sleep-warm limbs back to sleep. It doesn’t work, of course, the longer his eyes stay open ― the more the memories return.

Beside him, Kai groans and turns. He flops bodily over Soobin and he lets out a punched out gasp in return, summoning everything inside him to shove him off. Maybe it’s the hangover that amplifies the pain but his stomach _pulses_ where Kai accidentally knees him.

Kai simply scrunches his nose up like sleepy people do and blinks his eyes open so peacefully that Soobin wonders why _he_ is the only one feeling like he’d swallowed his tongue last night. For a second, they just stare at each other. Then, Kai ducks and tries to bite Soobin’s nose. 

It’s too early in the morning and Soobin is too hungover for this. The effort it takes him to push Kai away sends his brain cells into frenzy, lighting each nerve end into a worse headache than what he woke up with.

“Morning,” Kai says, so cheerful. Soobin wants to strangle him.

“Mm.”

“How’re you feeling?” he asks, sitting up on his elbows. “You were pretty out of it last night, had to drag you back here. Kept crying.”

Soobin’s stomach drops. “I kept _crying?_ ”

“You don’t remember?”

Soobin shakes his head and Kai looks at him with amusement. He groans and stretches and Soobin can almost hear him adjust, hear each mending jut of his muscles fall into place. His hoodie is simply grey and it makes Soobin look away, the colour evoking emotions in him he wished it didn’t. All these weeks since the did what he did to Beomgyu, he’s kept him an arm’s length away. There are still unanswered texts on his phone, missed calls lining up. But he can’t pick the call up. He can’t, he doesn’t know what he’ll say.

As if noticing whatever inner battle Soobin is going through in his head, Kai closes in and nuzzles into Soobin’s hair.

Kai is his oldest friend, in a way, they’ve grown up together. He’s a year younger than him but he’d lived down Soobin’s street as kids and they’d gone to dance academy together. At some point they became best friends before Soobin even knew what the word meant. They’d done things like this then too, as much as they do it now. When the pair of them weren’t tall and gangly and too awkward for their bodies to contain, they’d organise sleepovers and end up sleeping the whole night away instead of doing the fun things on their itinerary. It had always felt safe with Kai, even now, as he gently rubs his hair and Soobin automatically feels a little less bad about his headache.

“Let me get you some water,” he says and moves and Soobin instantly misses his warmth. “You pretty much tried to sell your lover yesterday.”

“Mhm,” Soobin mumbles, seeking warmth in the sheets as soon as he’s gone.

He hears Kai fidget with the tumbler and jar, knocking his fingers on the wooden table. Normally, Soobin would’ve bled it out with ease but with a hangover giving every kind of other hangover he has had a run for its money, Soobin gets annoyed with the persistence of the noise.

“Just spit it out.”

As soon as he gets the green to, Kai blurts, “Have you checked your texts hyung? 

It’s Soobin’s turn to blink. “Not since. Like. Last night, I think?”

“You were crying for Beomgyu hyung, yesterday.”

Soobin pauses, says nothing. All he does is breath in response, eyes wide open and staring at the inside of the blanket. 

“You kept crying, kept asking for him. I thought you’d be sick, and you were ― threw up all over the sidewalk but I genuinely thought you would be sick enough that we’d have to take you to the hospital.”

The guilt that surges inside him is unbeatable. He isn’t usually like this, so defeated and without purpose. The first few days away from home, Soobin had been on his best behaviour. He’d made sure to not do anything to worry them, made sure to not let anything fail his own mind so that they didn’t think anything was wrong. And yet, he’d let himself drink to death last night, let them worry.

Soobin doesn’t like worrying people. Soobin doesn’t like letting people know what he’s feeling.

“Hyung,” Kai says, there’s a tremble in his voice. “Give me your phone.”

So Soobin does. It’s sitting switched off under his pillow and he pulls it out. He doesn’t exactly remember if he charged his phone or not last night but he hands it to Kai without a fight. It’s an unspoken thing between the two of them. Whenever Soobin gets too overwhelmed with maintaining a presence, it’s Kai who brings him back. Tells him it’s okay to be out of it for a while, tells him he doesn’t always have to do things for people. Switches his phone on.

“Here,” Kai says. He hands the phone back to him along with the glass of water. The water burns down Soobin’s throat like he’s never had a drop of it in his entire life, but once it goes, he feels marginally better. His throat isn’t as dry anymore and he doesn’t feel like he’s swallowed bricks. 

There’s about thirty percent charge in his phone and about three hundred notifications. He swallows, opening the app and scrolling down till he finds who he’s looking for. The last text he’d received from Beomgyu was four days ago. A small, uncertain _hyung?_ that makes Soobin feel terrible for the amount of ghosting he’s done. They’re friends, best friends before they became whatever they have now. And Beomgyu had tried to maintain, he had tried to cling on to the friendship.

Soobin couldn’t do it like him though. Couldn’t keep the act for long enough knowing what he really felt could slip through in between any time. 

Soobin feels like a shitty person, wondering if Beomgyu has lost interest in contacting him after so long. A part of him doesn’t even want to text back, let the silence between them settle but he doesn’t want to give up just yet. He doesn’t want to let go of Beomgyu just yet. So, he sighs, types and back pedals multiple times. In the end, no words come to his mind and all he can do is throw his phone back under his pillow with a silent scream.

Kai watches him do so with extreme amusement. “Boy trouble?” he asks.

“Fuck off.”

“Beomgyu hyung has been asking for you,” Kai says, even though Soobin never asked. “Like, since you started camping at my house. Did you really think we wouldn’t know?”

The longer he speaks the more horrified Soobin feels. “Asking for me?”

“Yeah. You might be good at hiding things, but Beomgyu hyung isn’t. Cries in the cafeteria and annoys Yeonjun hyung after his classes are over to buy him food and take care of him. Taehyun thinks it’s because he doesn’t want to go home, you know, considering it’s all empty without you in it.”

 _Cries in the cafeteria._ How much more does he cry without Soobin catching a whiff of him? Soobin can’t even swallow anymore, the headache and guilt are assaulting each inch of his skin. He glares at Kai though he feels a tear track down the side of his face. “I didn’t ask.”

“And yet you’re crying.”

Soobin isn’t _crying._ He isn’t, he just doesn’t know what to do with all this information and the guilt. Cutting Beomgyu off is probably one of the worst things he’s ever done but he didn’t know how to separate himself from the feelings threatening to show on his face any other way. He knows, in hindsight, that he should’ve never let the kissing go on for so long ― should’ve never touched Beomgyu even if he asked for him to. 

He can still hear Beomgyu’s cries, somewhere in the back of his mind. Can still feel how soft his skin had felt beneath his fingers, against his body.

He cries harder and Kai falls over him, encloses him in a hug from behind when he tries to shove him off. He whispers small soothing things, circles the skin of his wrist with his fingers the way a mother consoling her child would. Soobin feels so small, so afraid. He feels like a child who has made a mistake he can’t amend; he feels helplessly caught in the stream taking him where it goes.

“Hyung,” Kai says. “You’re not unloveable. You’re not a burden. Beomgyu hyung loves you, and we can all see it written on his face. Why are you doing this to both of you?”

“He loves me,” Soobin admits and it tastes like defeat. “He loves me, but he doesn’t love me like that.”

Admitting it swallows the rush of the world in itself. Saying it out loud makes it real. There are no more strings of hope, no more _maybe he does._ What is there is the truth he has to resign himself to, no takebacks, no try agains. In all the time he has known Beomgyu, he’d just told himself Beomgyu didn’t like relationships. But there’s a difference in not liking in relationships and trusting true love more than you trust yourself. If Beomgyu just wasn’t cut out for relationships, Soobin could delude himself into thinking maybe one day he’d have a chance.

But it wasn’t that Beomgyu wasn’t cut out for relationships. Each one of his songs, everything he talked about ― the absolute root of things that made Beomgyu who he really was, boiled down to love. And it wasn’t that he didn’t believe in it, it was that he was waiting for it to come to him. 

Soobin had been here for so long, Soobin had been here each step of the way ― and Beomgyu was still waiting for it to come. 

“What makes you think so?” Kai asks.

Soobin closes his eyes, still silently crying. He feels his throat parting, everything he’s held in for the last three weeks piling over each other. “I know it. I know he doesn’t. It’s okay.”

“Beomgyu hyung wouldn’t do the things he does for someone he doesn’t like.” Before Soobin can interrupt, Kai continues. “Maybe he didn’t make it clear, because we always told him to, but he wouldn’t listen so maybe he didn’t make it clear. But Beomgyu hyung talks about you _all the time,_ you know. When you’re not around he’ll talk about your stupid fucking sleeping habits, he’ll talk about the time he fed you fries in your sleep and when you are here, he’ll forget the rest of us even exist. You should look at him when he looks at you, you’ll know what I mean. He doesn’t look at you like he looks at us, he looks at you like you’re the only person in his world.”

“Then why has he never seen me? All these years, I’ve been here. I’ve been here all this time, but Beomgyu’s still waiting for his _the one_ to come along.”

Kai makes a face that makes Soobin think he’s holding back only because Soobin’s crying. It makes him cry harder, the unintentional consideration. He just feels like an all-around loser, right now. Just pathetic.

“Hyung,” Kai says, lies back down on the bed and stares at the ceiling above them. He shakes his head, runs a hand through his hair. “Have you ever considered that he’s not waiting for his one but he’s waiting for his one to realize he’s _the one?_ ”

“What are you saying?”

“God, you’re such a grade schooler, hyung. What if Beomgyu hyung isn’t waiting for an ideal love story but for _you?_ ”

“What?”

“Hyung,” Kai says, turns to lie on his elbow so he’s facing Soobin. “You called him last night.”

Soobin’s blood turns cold. “What?”

“Yeah. You did. At first you were flirting with that guy by the counter, so we thought ― hey he’s having fun, so we’ll let him be. But then you started crying, and you wouldn’t stop asking for Beomgyu hyung, so we peeled you away from him and left you alone to sort shit out and called it a day, alright. But when we came back, you were on the phone and Taehyun ran to get you off it but you tripped and fell and he tripped and fell and you told Beomgyu hyung you missed him, or something like that.”

Soobin’s throat dries. He wants to throw up, he needs to, right about now.

“You know what I thought? I thought you were sick. I thought we should get you some help, I was scared. So scared. But Taehyun told me you crashed at Yeonjun hyung’s a few days ago, and that you were the same and I’ve never heard Beomgyu hyung talk about you in my company since you crashed here, you know. But I could see it on him, and I thought _oh,_ so that’s how it is.”

He gathers the bit of guts left in him, even if he isn’t sure he wants to know. “What’s how it is?”

“You love him,” Kai says, caressing his cheek and tucking a few strands of his hair behind his ears. “You love him, and he makes you happy and he isn’t here, so you aren’t happy. Has it ever occurred to you, hyung, that while you were waiting for him to come to you, he was doing the same?”

“Beomgyu isn’t like that, he’s…” Soobin trails off. Beomgyu’s like what? Beomgyu talks a lot. Every time he feels something, he has to let it out. Soobin knows this from experience, there hasn’t been one day where they’ve let a fight fester before this. Beomgyu never lets misunderstandings grow, he tells people what he feels. He does so without malice, without judgement. And Soobin misses him so much. “He’d tell me. If he felt something for me, he’d tell me.”

“I think you know him best, hyung. But when has he ever talked about what he’s really feeling?”

The realisation sweeps in slowly. Beomgyu talks a lot about what he’s feeling, never shies away from a discussion to sort out their differences. Soobin knows this from experience because they’ve never let their differences divide them before, because Beomgyu has always stepped in and interrupted before it could get to that. But it’s all only when his emotions, their feelings, affect more than just him. When what he’s feeling crosses past just his personal peace, Beomgyu talks about it.

Otherwise, he keeps it in.

“Hyung,” Kai starts again, and this time Soobin looks at him. Really looks at him. It’s something in the morning but the room is still numb with the night, dipped in dark foam. “He called me right after you hung up, asked me if I was with you. He told me how to nurse you back home so you don’t end up with a bad hangover, and he didn’t say when I asked, but I know he was crying.”

Soobin feels like an asshole. He feels like it’s a little too late to be realising this now after all the hurt he’s caused and that sends him into another sobbing spree. He doubles over and cries into his arms, hears Kai mutter something but isn’t paying attention until he begins to rub, soft, comforting lines down Soobin’s spine. 

“I know you’re thinking about all sorts of different things you know. I know you are,” Kai says. “It’s okay to be paranoid, hyung. Love leaves you like that, absolutely useless. And that’s okay, you’re allowed to feel that. You're allowed to be confused and you’re allowed to be angry. You’re allowed to be human. Stop thinking it makes you a burden, your emotions only weigh heavy on you ― not on us. Stop thinking you’ve made a mistake or you’re too late because you needed time to process this. It’s not your fault.”

Every word makes him cry harder and harder, makes his chest hurt and mind swim.

“And hey, you know what’s important?”

Soobin reels in a cough, tries to listen.

“It doesn’t matter how much time you took to realize,” Kai says. “Beomgyu hyung is still waiting at home for you.”

  
  
  


(“Soobin-sshi?” he asks. He looks very good, small and beautiful. “Are you okay? I think you might be drunk.”

“I’m not drunk,” Soobin protests. “I know what’s going around here! He’s making me a sober kamikaze and Taehyun and Kai are flirting in the corner like they always do. I think Yeonjun hyung is here too, even if he never actually comes to these things! Don’t you think so, I am happy to see him mingling even though he doesn’t get even a second to breathe these days.”

He cocks his head and looks at Soobin in amusement. “Yeah? Can you tell me who is who, around here?”

“Yeah,” Soobin slurs. He turns around and points at them. “That’s Taehyun, the shorter one. The boy who he’s sucking faces with is Kai, they are both annoying but they’re my best friends.”

“Yeah? Is that Yeonjun then? The one with the pink hair in the corner?”

Soobin nods. “He’s been going through so much these days you know I’m glad he’s here.”

“You seem to love them a lot, your friends. They’re all you’ve talked about all this time.”

Soobin sighs, looks back at him. He runs a hand down his face, strokes his thumb over his jaw. He doesn’t say anything about how Soobin’s hands probably smell like the drink he’d spilled over himself earlier, doesn’t even push him away. He stays there, looking like he wants to kiss him, and Soobin’s heartbeat spikes. “I love you too,” he says. “You’re the prettiest person I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah?” He looks down at Soobin’s lips, and then back up at his eyes. “Do you remember me then?

He nods. “You’re Beomgyu,” he says. “And I love you so much.” Then, he doubles over and cries.)

  
  
  


“Where are you going?” Kai asks him when he sees Soobin dressed up a little after dinner, the next day.

Soobin halts halfway through tying his shoelaces. He hasn’t packed the stuff he’d brought to Kai’s apartment, just in case. But he knows what he’s doing and he knows he needs to. “I’m,” he pauses, searches for words and looks at his shoes.

He’d brought them with Beomgyu two months ago, Beomgyu had paid for it and he’d never paid him back.

“I’m trying to find my way back home.”

  
  
  


It’s not winter yet, not even close, but the fog still descends over the neighbourhood where their old dormitories used to be in, in a quiet, gentle blanket. The streetlights glow dim, insisting a presence where they stand. Some kids are still outside, they look at Soobin like they recognize him but don’t know what he’s doing there. It makes sense, only first years get proper blocks of dormitory buildings. The second years barely scrape by the dingy little apartments turned dorms by the dining hall and if the third years don’t call in housing on time, they don’t even get as much. Everyone just expects you to start paying your rent once you cross the threshold into internship adulthood, and Soobin has always been terrified about that but looking at the kids ― so small yet so magnanimous ― makes him realize they’ll grow up too, just like everything else in life.

That was something Beomgyu used to say; every time Soobin would get too anxious about how he’d get by the year, about how it seemed like everyone was growing up except him, Beomgyu would ask him to look around. He’d say, _everything grows_ like it meant _growth was inevitable_. Soobin knows it is inescapable, but he wants to run from it anyway. It’s easier to let it go than stay put in one paralyzing moment and think about it.

Looking back, this is how he deals with everything. He runs away, he ignores it, he files it away till he can’t anymore. And it’s a miracle how patient Beomgyu is with him sometimes. Every time Soobin opens his mouth, every time he says something he meant to say ― something he means but doesn’t know how to convey ― he feels like this is the second Beomgyu will choose to walk away from him. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if it is, and so he runs away. 

This is where they met, these streets. 

Soobin had carried his luggage on till the door of building four, the key to room number 421 in his hands. He stared at the key, pictured his parents waving at him when he left, how proud they looked, and took a breath in to walk into the future he wasn’t really ever prepared for. He never thought he’d make friends, actually. Never thought he’d find someone to call a best friend. All through high school, Kai was the only one he’d felt comfortable enough to tell things to. And even to him he had never been able to say all that much, just gone over when he was overwhelmed and hoped it’d get better soon. 

He’s never felt free to this degree, to this extent, around anyone but Beomgyu. Beomgyu, individually, is someone vibrantly colourful. The first time he’d met him, Soobin was waiting for the elevator to arrive and Beomgyu tripped over the threshold of the building, managing to catch himself by the railings of the stairwell before he could fall down face first. Soobin had turned, hand extended midway as if to help him but hesitant in that he didn’t know how he’d respond afterwards in any case of communication. Beomgyu had huffed out a laugh as if at himself, looked up and smiled so bright Soobin thought there was something wrong with him. That maybe he hit his head somehow.

But Beomgyu warmed things over naturally. He smiled and Soobin felt like he held the sun between his teeth, he left his things around everywhere in the apartment and Soobin felt like he was back home again. Beomgyu made him feel like both: a kid who based his entire world on someone at the centre of it, and a responsible figure who couldn’t stand the idea of seeing him sad. 

And it wasn’t just him. When Kai moved to Seoul finally, he met Beomgyu and was instantly attracted to his orbit. Through Beomgyu, Soobin met Yeonjun, and knew Yeonjun was just as endeared by his little habits. Taehyun was difficult to grasp at first, somewhat shy despite the air of confidence and a little secretive, but Soobin knew he liked Beomgyu just as much as he pretended not to. Soobin thinks it was the love Beomgyu held for the world that made him so loveable. 

There was no way one couldn’t love him.

And Soobin did. Soobin does. Loves him. Loves him, present tense.

It took him some time, warming up to the idea. Each conflict of emotion, each press of heart, just led to one direction. At the time, it’d made him feel immensely guilty. It’d made him hate himself, considering he thought that not only did he dump the majority of his thoughts on Beomgyu, he was also now somehow dumping his unrequited feelings for him. He had not meant to; he had not meant to be an idiot or be so difficult. Beomgyu always cracked him open easily, was always the first to notice when he was going through it a little too hard, always so persistent to know what was wrong, to understand Soobin with more interest than anyone had ever offered him. And Soobin didn’t really know what to do with that.

Soobin was a difficult person to understand but Beomgyu made him feel less as such. 

He stares at building four that was once their dorm, the balcony that used to belong to their very specific _Stay at Home Saturday’s_ drinking parties. He remembers the clink of glasses, the rush of energy. Once Taehyun had cried in their midst there, he’d cried so much Yeonjun had broken free from his awkward charade of being a grown up adult in front of the kids and hugged him just so he could sob with him, told him he was afraid too. Beomgyu, always the easiest with emotion, had cried with them because it was just _so sad hyung,_ and Soobin had felt tears prick his eyes simply because it all felt so undeserving. Just five young people, so small in the world that was too big for them to grasp. Just five people who didn’t know what to do with the lives they’d been given. Kai hadn’t cried, he’d made fun of their crying fest and uploaded it to Instagram and tagged each one of them. There was still a zoomed in face of Soobin crying on his highlights that Soobin never failed to spite him for, but that night was a night.

And now he looks at the red lantern hanging on the balcony, so different from the one he’d bought with Beomgyu, and thinks: _they’ve finally outgrown this place._

Beomgyu would tell him it’s not such a bad thing to grow up and out of places you’ve spent your life in. Life is constantly subject to change; all he has to do is let it because the change is what gives you security. It is the only thing you can depend on.

So, he exhales ― sharp. His next inhale is so cold that it freezes his nose, makes something in his temples tingle and hurt. Beomgyu’s always there, telling him to take his time, waiting for him however long it takes. Beomgyu’s always there, like the light at the end of a dark, dark tunnel. 

And he’s kept him waiting for long enough as it is. 

Soobin closes his eyes, feels a breeze sweep past him and tingle at the back of his ears. Then, he kicks a stray pebble towards the memory of the place they’d once lived in and wonders if he’ll be welcome back home.

  
  
  


And as it turns out, he doesn’t have to wonder at all.

It takes him one second, two and then he’s ringing their doorbell. It’s about one in the morning but he knows Beomgyu isn’t asleep. Normally, this is when he plays his games but from what he’s learned with his phone call on the way back with Yeonjun, Beomgyu doesn’t do that anymore. Yeonjun says Beomgyu tells him he’s sleeping early but he suspects it’s because he doesn’t want to worry him, says Beomgyu doesn’t sleep in his room anymore.

More than anyone in the world, Soobin knows why that is. But it doesn’t hit him, not completely, until the world pauses and Beomgyu opens the door.

It’s been three weeks since they’ve last seen each other. Beside their porch, by the cherry tree, is a golden lamplight that’s illuminating the scared, shadowed part of Beomgyu’s face. In the silver wash of the moonlight, Soobin realises that the white hoodie that falls lower than his thighs is _his_ , hiding the pair of black shorts even though the edges still show. Beomgyu’s expression goes through a myriad of changes in less than two seconds and Soobin tracks each one with his eyes, frantically alert. 

_What’s the difference?_

His eyes are red, exhausted and sleepy and his hair is a mush, tousled to hell and back. He stares at Soobin, eyes widening when the reality of the situation registers. He looks dumbfounded, stunned as if he can’t believe Soobin is really here. As if he can’t believe this is happening. 

“Hyung?” Beomgyu hesitantly reaches up to touch Soobin’s face and the cold of the night leaves him whole. “Is it really you?”

Soobin can’t help it. He laughs but it comes out a little wet. He really isn’t as strong as he makes himself out to be sometimes, huh. 

“Who else, idiot?” He asks, nuzzles a bit without knowing into the hand on his cheek. “I’m home.”

The contrast of wandering around in the cold fog and the warmth of Beomgyu’s hand on his cheek is so palpable that Soobin forgets what he wanted to say. All he wants to do is crawl closer to that fire and settle inside it, thinking there can’t be a place in the world that’s safer than that.

Soobin wants to hug him. It’s been so long and he’s so sorry and he’s so afraid he hasn’t got a place here anymore. It's either that or turning tail and running away, but he can’t go back just yet. He purses his lips and thinks _screw it,_ moves to pull him close, but it’s then that Beomgyu realises what he wants to do and pushes him back. Soobin doesn’t know if he meant to hit that hard but his ribs throb where Beomgyu’s knuckles dig. Beomgyu heaves a little and steps back, where there was once a half stunned peace in his eyelids is now replaced by blown anger.

Soobin knows he deserves it, but it still hurts. 

“Where were you all these days, hyung?” Beomgyu asks him and his lips tremble. Soobin tries to reach out again, just to hold his hands, anchor himself to something so Soobin doesn’t bite his teeth and turn into a coward again. But Beomgyu dodges the touch, puts his hand up in between them. “Why come back now? Why―”

“I’m sorry, I―”

“Was it that bad?” And now Beomgyu really is crying and Soobin hates himself for letting it come to this. “Was it that terrible of an idea to sleep with me?”

He doesn’t know what to say. He opens his mouth helplessly, closes it when the words don’t come out. Nothing makes sense to say. Beomgyu stares at him, looking so pretty even when he’s crying and Soobin feels his heart sink, despises how useless he becomes when it comes to things like these.

“I know,” he tries to find words again, finally. “I know I fucked it up and that this is all my mistake. I know, I know ― _Beomgyu_ , I know. But will you let me explain, will you let me apologize?”

The anger falls. Beomgyu looks at something behind him, resignation decorating his features and Soobin can’t shake the sense that he’s said something wrong, or done something wrong, because Beomgyu’s looking at him like he’s expecting the worst and Soobin has never wanted to be the person who puts that look on his face. 

“Come in,” Beomgyu says, voice soft, forgiving. “I’ll make you coffee.”

“No!” Soobin says. “No it’s okay, I had dinner and I bought some snacks on the way, I’m fine.”

Inside, Soobin sees what Yeonjun meant when he said Beomgyu camps in the living room these days. There are covers thrown over their couch, the kitchen counter swaddled in empty cup ramens and nutella boxes. The coffee table has transformed into something out of a _Are You a Hoarder_ advertisement with the amount of books, dishes and stationary left on it.

The corridor is still dark.

“I,” Beomgyu hesitates. “I didn’t have the time to sort through the stuff. Project files, you know.”

Soobin nods but it doesn’t register. He simply continues staring at Beomgyu who looks visibly out of his own element in the waning golden light of the living room.

Soobin fists his fingers beside him, doesn’t know where to keep his hands because they keep trying to reach out for Beomgyu. 

“Beomgyu, I―”

“Hyung, before you say anything. Let me speak, let me say this.” Soobin doesn’t say anything but Beomgyu tilts his chin in defiance, daring him to say otherwise even if it’s subtle. “I asked you to kiss me and I wasn’t thinking. I asked you to kiss me because I liked you and I hoped you’d realize that when you kissed me.”

Soobin has been hearing this all through the weeks but hearing it from Beomgyu himself makes his heart stutter in quiet hope. He opens his mouth but doesn’t get to say anything, heart flying out of his chest when Beomgyu keeps talking. 

“I liked you and I thought you liked me back, and I thought if you liked me back then there was nothing that could go wrong here because you like me and I like you and we like each other. I thought there was nothing that could go wrong, you know. But you never said anything, never called me out on the crush, never said you felt anything similar. And then ― then we did that, and you said _that,_ ” Beomgyu stops, halfway through, wiping his eyes angrily with the back of his sleeves. It’s when Soobin realizes he himself has been crying too, feeling the wetness on his cheeks. “And you said that and I thought, _it’s okay. It’s okay, he doesn’t know I like him. It’s okay._ But then you― you _left._ You didn’t even say anything, you _left._ ”

All these weeks there had been a blind corridor neatly connecting his understanding of what went down with Beomgyu’s part of the story. He had been staring there, in the middle of it, trying to connect both the stories, trying to see how to switch on the lights. He’d had somehow been convinced it wouldn’t matter to Beomgyu if he’d been around or not. This and all that’s happened bridged that gap, bridging that ununderstanding of Beomgyu’s person.

Soobin stares. Cluttered mess of the room, cluttered mess of his heart, cluttered cold of the night. 

“I’m sorry,” Soobin says. “If I’d known ― if I’d known this would end up hurting you so bad, I wouldn’t have done it.”

He’s still standing in the doorway, unable to look away from Beomgyu who looks so pissed off, antagonism in every bitter smile. Over the time he’s met him, Beomgyu has mellowed into a patient person. Stubborn still, but patient, nevertheless. He doesn’t remember seeing so much anger on Beomgyu, he doesn’t remember thinking he has it in him to be so angry at something.

Soobin hopes the anger is directed at him. Soobin hopes it isn’t himself who Beomgyu is mad at.

“I found your fucking―” Beomgyu sniffs, loudly, rubs his eyes again. “I found your fucking birthday gift for me in the drawer of your desk.”

Soobin’s eyes widen, heartbeat quickens. He knows there isn’t anything to be afraid of, that it doesn’t matter if Beomgyu knows his feelings now because that’s what he’s here to tell him anyway. But sentiment is still a coward and it’s still afraid of rejection despite the hope coursing through him at each one of Beomgyu’s words, even his anger. 

“You weren’t meant to―”

“Hyung, I’m sorry, okay?” Beomgyu looks so helpless, he swallows his tears and looks so helpless. Soobin clenches and unclenches his fist at his side, doesn’t know if he deserves to touch him yet. “I’m sorry I liked you, I’m sorry I ruined this and what our friendship meant to you. I’m sorry, so can you stop _punishing_ me? Can you― I’m sorry, I’m _so sorry._ I thought you loved me, I can’t believe how wrong I got that.”

Despite the cold that settles in through his words, Soobin fists his fingers and begins moving towards him. He’s stayed put all this while; heard enough to know what he needs to do. When he reaches out to pull Beomgyu, he doesn’t feel like he’s burdening or imposing on him. When he reaches out to pull Beomgyu, he does so with the promise of safety and it’s worth something, it’s worth the world to him.

Beomgyu melts into his embrace, the tense jut of his shoulders pulling soft. Soobin feels him shake but no loud sobs come, and he wonders how many times he’s cried all these lonely nights muffling his tears the same way. He feels bad about being an idiot about everything. Three weeks of silence, of more than a lifetime's worth of distance and his chest finally eases when Beomgyu sucks in a breath entirely too hard and hiccups. 

_What’s the difference? I’m back now._

“Idiot,” he berates, quietly. Beomgyu doesn’t even reply, just cries harder. “Fucking idiot, you don’t get it.”

“Then help me understand.” He punches Soobin’s chest lightly to punctuate his demand. “If I don’t get it, tell me what this is clearly.”

There’s no point in beating around the bush. There never has been.

“I love you,” Soobin says and he feels Beomgyu tremble in the circle of his hands. He tightens his hold around him, hoping the warmth can convince him of what his words cannot. “I know I called you that night, I don’t remember what I said but Kai told me I called you and that I cried.”

“You fell down too,” Beomgyu snorts, sniffs. “I could hear you falling down.”

Soobin laughs. “Yeah. Kai told me I did that, even told me I looked at people and called them by your name.”

“Why did you get so drunk?”

Soobin doesn’t know why. Kai and Taehyun were going out for the weekend and Soobin thought he should let go too, just one night. Just to ease himself out of the responsibilities tailor-made for him, all the hurt and guilt and regret. He doesn’t know what made him go, but he does have an inkling of the idea and so he decides to be honest and say it as it is. “I missed you,” he tells Beomgyu, untangles himself from the embrace to look him straight in the eye. “I missed you so much it hurt to breath. I needed to do something.”

“Then why did you leave?”

“I thought you didn’t love me back, like that. Like the way I love you.”

Beomgyu’s eyes are so wide and yet he still sees the hesitance in them, like he’s afraid to hope. His nose is red and Soobin smiles, pokes it and moves his fingers down to hold his jaw.

“How do you love me?” Beomgyu asks.

Soobin looks him straight in the eye so he knows this is real, feels what Soobin doesn’t have the words to say. “I’m in love with you. I know I never said it aloud, but I know you know, and I’m sorry that these weeks somehow convinced you I didn’t because I did. I do, I love you and I’ve never liked anyone as I like you ― and I know it’s too early to tell, but I’ve known you for almost three years now and even if you say no and reject me here, I know I’ll still think about you every day. I don’t think I’ll ever like someone like I like you ever again.”

Beomgyu presses his lips into a line and closes his eyes, punches his chest as the leftover tension _finally_ eases out of him. He opens his eyes and Soobin’s heart throbs with how relieved they look, how relieved he looks. He shakes his head and another tear slips out, framing the side of his face like stars in a night sky. “Then why would you take so long to tell me? Why make me wait here without a word? Why?” Each one his words are paired with a weightless hit on Soobin’s chest. His breath catches and he heaves and Soobin thinks he’s going to cry again but instead he fists his collar and pulls him down.

And _oh_.

In all the times they’ve kissed, Soobin has familiarized himself with the taste of Beomgyu, the shape of his person in his hands. Soobin knows each sound he makes, is aware of every hard press of his body. But this isn’t a kiss like all the other times. In this one, Beomgyu arches into him without Soobin having to pull him to do so, presses his fingers at the back of his neck and cups his jaw to kiss him again. Beomgyu parts his lips with his own, the hand cupping his jaw reaches up to hold the side of his face and Soobin finds himself crying before he even knows he’s on the verge of it.

Beomgyu tastes like coffee and mint, smells freshly showered and so good. It takes Soobin a second, wet in his eyes, to finally reciprocate with just as much fervour. His hands nestle around Beomgyu’s waist, tie themselves there. He kisses him back, almost half drunk on the taste of his lips. It’s not sweet or honey-like, it tastes like strongly brewed coffee ― something he doesn’t even like. But it’s _Beomgyu._ He doesn’t need any other reason to be addicted to this when it’s Beomgyu, he doesn’t need anything more.

When they separate, he rests his forehead on Beomgyu’s face and watches the moonlight through the kitchen window cast shadows on the delicate dip of his nose.

“I’m sorry for yelling at you,” Beomgyu says. “I don’t know, I’ve been missing you and been mad at myself but seeing you here ― the anger somehow turned against you.”

“As it should’ve.” Soobin kisses him again, digs his thumb into his hips. “I left without saying anything and I was the asshole who ghosted you instead of explaining what happened.”

“Yeah but I wasn’t clear about anything either, you couldn’t have known.”

Soobin smiles and Beomgyu kisses it off his face. They do this over and over again, standing by the bright golden light of the kitchen counter and dipping their fingers in the moonlight that cascades on every visible bit of skin.

They talk about everything that night, of all the misunderstandings and things that came in between. Soobin can’t help but tease him about having a crush when Beomgyu tells him about the things he’s done to make him notice it and Beomgyu straddles his hips in response, ducks to bite his collarbones that isn’t as much a punishment as he thinks it is. Soobin laughs and then doubles over crying once again when he realizes he could’ve almost lost this and Beomgyu lets him cry into his chest, threads his fingers through his hair and murmurs soft acceptances in his ears.

“You’re an idiot,” Beomgyu laughs but it comes out thick with emotion.

Soobin looks up and presses a kiss to his chin, to his throat. “You’re an idiot too.”

  
  
  


Soobin will never get used to it. The forgiveness that comes with waking up in his arms in the morning. 

When he wakes up, Beomgyu is still asleep and it’s a Thursday. Soobin has his schedule memorised, knows Beomgyu has a five-hour Art Theory lecture in the afternoon and he’ll be extra clingy before it. He decides to make him pasta and toast, just to start off the morning with more than the coffee and bread he usually stuffs his face with to go. He also hopes it comes off as an apology, an apology he realised was due when Beomgyu held too tight to him last night ― whispered things in his sleep he wasn’t aware he did. Things like _don’t go,_ like _you keep leaving._ An apology, he feels, is due yet again when he returns to Beomgyu’s room with a tray in his hands and finds him kneeling on the floor crying silently. 

“Beomgyu,” he says, urgently, leaving the tray where it is when he kneels next to him and cups his face. Beomgyu blearily blinks his eyes open to look at him and starts crying once again and Soobin knows it’s a wound that’ll take some time to heal. He knows he’s caused it and he knows it was somewhat out of his hands, but he still feels the guilt claw at his heart.

He understands.

“Beomgyu,” he tries again, tucks a couple of strands of his hair behind his ears. “Look at me. What’s wrong?”

“I thought―” Beomgyu cries harder at that and Soobin doesn’t know what to do, how to make it better. He’s still just as rough about these things. “Where were you?”

“I was making you breakfast. Long day ahead, remember?”

Beomgyu sobs and mutters something like _fucking idiot._ And Soobin smiles at him, helplessly, leans down to kiss the tears off his cheeks. “Did you think I left?”

He shakes his head, moves closer and hugs him, hands tight around Soobin’s waist. “No,” he says. “I thought I dreamt you.”

It dawns on him like cold water running down his spine. “You thought I was never here.”

How hard were these weeks on Beomgyu for him to convince himself that if he woke up alone in his bed it meant Soobin wasn’t even there in the first place? More than anyone else in the world, Soobin knew why Beomgyu locked himself out of his room and preferred the living room to it. Beomgyu is a violent sleeper but he needs someone to keep him grounded.

Soobin is that _someone_. 

“Stop thinking,” Beomgyu says, like he knows what’s inside his head. “It’s not your fault.”

“It’s―”

“Hyung. It’s not your fault.” Beomgyu pulls back. “Of course, I needed you here, but if you needed time to sort shit out then that’s not your fault. You don’t inconvenience people merely by existing hyung, stop thinking about it like that.”

“I’m not―”

“Not _yet._ But you will, I know you. You’ve got a whole image of yourself in your head who is a constant bother to people, but you’re not. You’re not a bother to me, you’re not a burden to me. I love you and I want to know you, sums and parts and all.”

For a second, Soobin says nothing. Then he laughs and as it turns out, they’ve both got something to be thankful for after all.

“ _Sums and parts and all?_ ” He repeats, incredulously and Beomgyu chases after his fingers as if threatening to bite them off. 

So, they take it. They take it slow.

  
  
  


Yeonjun has a lot to say the next day when they finally break the news. Kai smiles at Soobin behind his coffee and Taehyun simply rolls his eyes, takes a picture of them together to upload on his IG story. (Beomgyu immediately goes into his influencer persona, puts one legs over Soobin’s, winds a hand across his neck and presses a kiss to his cheek. Soobin is blown red, blushing furiously but he refuses to let it show. Instead he winds a hand around Beomgyu’s stomach and leans into him.)

Yeonjun gawks, points at them with his phone and huffs out loud. “Stop doing that,” he says.

Beomgyu looks at him innocently. “Stop doing what?” 

“That. The thing you’re doing with Soobin right now.”

Beomgyu looks at Soobin and Soobin wants to laugh but he maintains a neutral face, let’s Beomgyu play his role at being clueless and look back at Yeonjun with a shrug. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I’ll throw this phone at you.”

“Okay, sure.” He’s taken aback when Beomgyu pulls him by his collar, presses a kiss to his lips and ends up smiling in between. Soobin kisses him back just when he feels him pull away. Yeonjun groans, Taehyun says something like _wow, you guys are the annoying type._ When he finally pulls back, Beomgyu smiles at Yeonjun sweetly. “Now I deserve it. Go on, throw your phone at me.”

They go back and forth for a while. Beomgyu and Yeonjun have two of the foulest mouths in their year and if allowed, they can go on forever. Taehyun proceeds to record the two of them right when Beomgyu sneaks a hand underneath the table to hold on to Soobin’s. Their fingers intertwine together easily, and he can’t hide the smile that leaks out of him at the sight. Beomgyu’s hand is small, fingers bony and slender compared to Soobin’s larger, thicker ones. Soobin plays with his fingers before cusping them back, flushing when he realizes they’re indeed the _annoying type._

When he looks up, Kai is looking at him and he’s doing so with a smile. “Are you happy, hyung?” he asks, only for the two of them to hear.

The creepers grow over the pipes. The slow-moving jazz rewinds to play one of the recent pop hits. Soobin can smell Beomgyu’s caramel macchiato wafting over to his nose with his own bitter coffee clasped in his other hand.

He is. “I am.”

  
  
  


Beomgyu tells him ― the world wouldn't exist without the sun, plants would die without the rain. He says _stop feeling guilty about depending on me. I need you in my life just as much as you need me in yours. Everyone needs someone, that’s what people mean when we say this world is dependent on coexistence. Everyone needs something to lean on in this world, so don’t be stupid._

Soobin kisses the laughter from the edge of his lips. He tells him he loves him instead.

  
  
  


“Yeonjun hyung was asking about how this happened,” Soobin tells him, three weeks later, when they’re both sitting on Soobin’s bed in his room and Beomgyu’s preoccupied with setting up the console of a new digital keyboard he’s bought. There’s no space in Beomgyu’s room turned studio so they’re making use of the place between Soobin’s desk and his closet to shove it in. Beomgyu is, actually. Soobin is just watching him work with a million different thoughts in his mind.

Beomgyu frowns at the controls and shakes his head. “About how what happened?” he asks, not paying attention.

“This. Us. How _we_ happened? Did you tell him before you told me?”

Beomgyu smiles when he figures out where the plug goes and mentally congratulates himself for getting it right without anyone’s help. He pushes it in, completely ignoring whatever Soobin has to say and stands up to dust himself off. He isn’t particularly covered in dust, half does it only for the dramatization of it all. He’s been trying to assemble the set up for the keyboard he’d finally had the money to buy, after eyeing it for an entire year, almost half the day and Soobin has been of no help at all. He’d slept since the morning and woke up to make them something for lunch and has been muttering incoherent things ever since. Beomgyu has half a mind to ask him to elaborate but knowing Soobin, he knows it’ll take another half a day to get the answer out of him.

And it’s already evening, the sun setting over the horizon and dressing Soobin’s room in a pretty shade of red. Beomgyu sighs, for a minute, watching the dusk from the window in the corner. His eyes trace the outline of curtains tucked away from each other, the sweet puff of the scent of Soobin’s fabric conditioner still mellowed in each little nook. 

A small _Beomgyu_ is the only warning he gets before Soobin is tugging him back blindly, uncaring of the fall and Beomgyu can only close his eyes before he lands on Soobin’s lap.

“What the fuck?” he laughs, thumbs Soobin’s shoulder hard enough to hurt. 

Soobin groans and lets him adjust himself so Beomgyu’s sitting on his lap instead of being awkwardly sprawled over it. “You weren’t listening to me,” Soobin says, smiles. “I was just trying to get your attention.”

“You could’ve asked me to turn around! What if I fell, hmm? What if I broke my pretty nose?”

“You know I’d never let you fall.” Soobin trails a line over his nose with the back of his index finger and Beomgyu tries to mimic biting it off. “God, you’re like a human puppy.”

“Good to know,” Beomgyu says. “Didn’t ask.”

He loops his hands around Soobin’s neck, playing with the hair at the back of his head. Soobin laughs and Beomgyu can’t help it, he leans down to kiss his dimples. It’s the simplest thing to do at the moment, Soobin’s face is pretty and pink and Beomgyu is close enough to touch it. 

“Stop talking back,” Soobin says, rests his hand on the back of Beomgyu’s waist. They feel warm and big even through the sweatshirt, clasp the entirety of it almost. “I was trying to ask you something.”

Beomgyu rolls his eyes. “Go on, ask away.”

“Did you tell Yeonjun hyung about us? He seemed to know everything when I― when I went to his house.”

“You of all people should know this.” Beomgyu laughs again. “I don’t hide anything from Yeonjun hyung.”

Yeonjun is the first person he goes to for anything. He was the first friend Beomgyu had ever made here, despite having met Soobin first. He had also been the one person in the world Beomgyu had wanted to befriend the _most_. In high school, they called Yeonjun a part of the God Trio. Alongside two of his other friends Beomgyu doesn’t remember the names of anymore, Yeonjun was the coolest senior the lot of them had seen in a while. And Beomgyu had of course, never been able to talk to him in school having been a year younger, but they’d somehow clicked one week into his freshman year when Yeonjun took care of his drunk ass one night and Beomgyu treated him to breakfast the next morning.

He thinks, if Soobin wasn’t his _thing_ then maybe Yeonjun would be. He remembers having a crush on Yeonjun anyway, naive and sixteen-years-old, looking at the cool senior who danced from afar. 

“There you go again with that fond look.” When Beomgyu looks at Soobin again he finds him talking with a pout and it takes everything in him to not lean down and kiss it away. “Why are you thinking about Yeonjun hyung with that look?”

“Hyung, are you seriously jealous?”

“I’m not jealous,” Soobin looks away. “I’m just. Wondering. You’re close, right? The two of you.”

Beomgyu doesn’t have enough in him to contain his laughter but he does anyway. He bites his lips and pinches Soobin’s nose, earning a yell out of him. “We’re from the same high school, hyung. You know the story!”

“I know, I’m just. We met freshman year too and I am closer to you in age, why am _I_ not your best friend.”

He’s so _fond_ of this man. So _fond._ Beomgyu basically beams, he’s pretty sure he’s swallowed the sun. “You’re so _stupid,_ ” he says and knocks his forehead with his own. Before Soobin can complain, he kisses him, and the reaction is instantaneous. Whatever he’d been saying is lost when Beomgyu pulls back and leans to give him a small peck again, lost in the flurry of a dazed glance and his rising heartbeat. “You’re my best friend! You’ve always been! Did you somehow _miss_ the memo entirely? It’s been three years, hyung!”

Soobin’s still looking at his lips but he manages to string a coherent sentence anyway. “I’m your best friend but you don’t tell me the things you tell Yeonjun hyung.”

“Like what? I tell you everything?” 

Soobin moves and Beomgyu knows he wants him to kiss him again, so he does. It lasts less than a second but he still feels his lips tingle when they separate. “You don’t tell me things like what you feel about me, things like what’s bothering you.”

“I tell you everything,” Beomgyu laughs into his mouth. “I literally tell you everything. You don’t even have to ask; I tell you everything. Not a day goes by when I don’t make a mental note to tell you each increasingly weird thing happening in the department. And how could I have told you I liked you, hyung? I wasn’t sure you liked me back and I’m not the kind of person to take a chance on rejection!”

Soobin doesn’t reply and Beomgyu doesn’t get a chance to ask him where the question stemmed from. He cups the back of his neck and pulls him down to kiss him and Beomgyu kisses back, still laughing about Soobin’s misplaced envy. Of course, he tells Yeonjun everything, but aside from what he felt about Soobin, he tells _him_ everything too. It’s an unfound worry to have, Beomgyu preferring someone over Soobin. As if he ever can. 

“Wait,” Beomgyu says, pushes his shoulders back. “Let me wash my hands, they’re covered in dust.”

“They’re not.” Soobin looks down at his lips and tries to close in again but Beomgyu grins and pushes him back. He gets up off his lap and sprints to the washroom, sees Soobin shake his head and bite his lips, lean back on the bed to stare at the ceiling.

In the mirror, he sees himself flushed red ― wearing another one of Soobin’s oversized sweatshirts that fit a little too large on him. It goes without even saying these days. Beomgyu has been finding shirts and hoodies he _hasn’t_ stolen from Soobin in his closet and he has no recollection of keeping and Soobin hasn’t even been batting an eye when he wears them. Beomgyu lowkey suspects Soobin has a thing for him in his shirts but he doesn’t know for sure. Soobin doesn’t usually say what’s on his mind.

“Are you washing your hands or contemplating your life?”

Beomgyu whirls and finds Soobin leaning by the door frame, raising an eyebrow at him. Instantly feeling embarrassed, he looks back at his reflection and runs the water. “It’s the mirror,” he says. “It makes you do weird shit like think about yourself and stuff.”

“Sure.” Beomgyu can hear the shit-eating grin on his face. “Are you done washing your hands now?”

Beomgyu rinses his hands clean of the lather and scrubs the valleys of his fingers, washing them again and cupping some water to splash on his face. The water is a relief to his increasing body temperature that Soobin has _nothing_ to do with. He springs some more water for good measure and then closes the tap, wiping his hands on his shirt and pulling the neck of it to wipe his face off.

Soobin’s there in an instant, all of a sudden, caging him in. Beomgyu’s laugh echoes through the closed space as he steps back from Soobin looming over him and looks away. “What’s gotten into you?” he asks, refusing to look at him.

“Nothing.” Soobin puts a hand under his chin and turns his face back. Beomgyu is so _warm_ on the inside by how much love he carries for him, how much love Soobin holds inside him too. “I love you.”

Beomgyu pulls him down by the collar and kisses him and Soobin’s hands automatically find his waist, the back of his thighs, so they’re pressed chest to chest. It’s in moments like these when he’s made aware of how different they are in height. Soobin towers over him and Beomgyu has to stand on his tiptoes to make their kisses comfortable. He’s been working out over the past year with Taehyun and Yeonjun, but even if he hadn’t been doing so, Soobin’s proportions are still somewhat larger than his. Broad shoulders against narrow frame, big hands on smaller waist. 

Beomgyu would be lying if he said it didn’t make him feel a certain way.

Soobin’s hands are patient where they catch on the line of his body but Beomgyu’s move with a renewed kind of desperation to feel him as close as possible. When Soobin snakes his hands underneath Beomgyu’s shirt to trace a line over the small of his waist, Beomgyu shoves his under Soobin’s collar to push the expanse of skin along his shoulders. Soobin shivers at the touch, presses more insistent kisses on his mouth.

He pulls back briefly and smiles into the space between them. Beomgyu hums, swipes Soobin’s lips with his thumb and eases his body when Soobin taps his thighs. Soobin picks him up just like that, a startling grip at the back of his thigh as the only warning before Beomgyu is grappling to find purchase on his shirt and Soobin is depositing him on the counter.

“Fuck, _ah―_ ” Beomgyu barely gets a second to speak before Soobin is kissing his neck, biting the skin in the valley of his shoulders. He soothes each bite with his tongue, desire shaped like two hands carrying the weight of the entire world in between them. “Hyung, wait.”

Soobin pulls back and Beomgyu locks him between his legs. He finds it so endearing how Soobin had just been biting bruises down the column of his throat but one look at his eye and he’s blushing like he’s never been in this situation before. “What?” he asks, gaze still unwavering despite the flush high on his cheeks. “What is it?”

“Why are we still here?” he whispers and it seems to break Soobin out of his bout of embarrassment because Soobin’s closing in again, hands on either side of Beomgyu as he teases a kiss with sudden confidence. 

“Why? Where else do you want to go?”

Now it’s Beomgyu’s turn to flush. He stares at the line of Soobin’s throat instead of his eyes and mutters, “I don’t know. Um. Your room.”

“Yeah?” Soobin dips down, kisses him again. “What are we going to do in my room?”

 _Good question._ What are they going to do in his room? 

Soobin doesn’t let him speak, goes back to kissing him again. His hands are all over him and Beomgyu feels his breath hitch with how incessant they are. He tries his best to push back just as much. He tilts his head, deepening the kiss and squeezes Soobin’s waist with his thighs. Soobin let’s go of his mouth again to finish what he’d started, kisses the side of his neck and says, “You didn’t say what we’re going to do in my room.”

Beomgyu tilts his head back and gasps when he feels Soobin’s tongue on the hollow of his throat. His fingers find Soobin’s hair, knotting in their midst without care of being too harsh and Soobin seems to enjoy the tug because he can feel his lips stretch into a smile at the base of his neck. “I― _ah,_ ” Beomgyu almost cries when Soobin chooses that second to bunch his shirt up under his forearms, head falling back and nearly banging against the mirror. “I don’t know.”

He shivers with the assault of cold air against bare skin and Soobin steps back a little, momentarily, raking his eyes over Beomgyu’s naked torso. They’ve gotten to this point many times over the last few weeks but neither of them has had enough time or the energy to make it past. 

Now however, desire is a creature in between them. Beomgyu’s chest heaves trying to catch his breath, eyes tracking each movement of Soobin between his legs. Soobin looks at him just once, lips swollen, hair tousled. Then, he bends to capture one of Beomgyu’s nipples in his mouth and oh, well _._

This is a sensation he hasn’t felt before. He’s never felt _anything like this_ before. 

Beomgyu gasps, pressing a hand against his mouth to stifle every sound that threatens to leak out. He’s known they were sensitive, has played with them once in a while trying to get himself off but he didn’t _know_ they could be this sensitive. Every slide of Soobin’s tongue, the graze of his teeth against the hard nubs and each pull of his lips goes straight to his core and Beomgyu can do only so much to keep himself from shivering, from trapping Soobin there with a death grip on his waist. 

“Soobin―” he tugs at his hair, pulls him up from his chest despite the need to push him back there. “Hyung. Hyung _._ ”

“Tell me,” Soobin nips at his lips, kisses him on the mouth again. 

“Room, please. _Please._ ”

This time, Soobin doesn’t tease him, simply picks him up again. Beomgyu’s hands automatically wrap around his neck, legs still gripping his waist afraid of the imminent fall. Soobin walks him out of the bathroom easily, revealing a now entirely too dark bedroom. The sky rumbles outside the floor to ceiling balcony doors, a bruise-shaped sky outside. Soobin deposits him on the bed, and Beomgyu gasps at the cold touch of the sheets from where his shirt is riding up. He climbs over him, eyes still half lidded, expression punch drunk from all the kissing they’ve done. Beomgyu pulls him down again and kisses him once more, unable to resist the urge and Soobin kisses him twice in return.

“Do you want to do this with me?” Soobin asks.

Beomgyu smiles, just to be coy. “Do what?”

It doesn’t deter Soobin from what he’s trying to say, he shakes his head and grins and Beomgyu feels like he’s lucked out too much in life. It’s _unfair_ to be on the other end of such a smile, those dimples and those bright eyes.

“Do you want me to fuck you?” Soobin asks. “Are you sure about this?”

Beomgyu feels heat fester in his throat but answers as level-headedly as he possibly can spread out like this under Soobin’s wandering gaze. “I’m sure, why wouldn’t I be?”

“It’s your first time. I just―”

Beomgyu sits up, cups his jaw and kisses him to shut him up. It’s on brand for Soobin to have Beomgyu writhing under him and still ask him if he wants Soobin for his first time. “I trust you,” Beomgyu says, punctuating each word with a kiss. He loves kissing Soobin, loves feeling the outline of his heart-shaped lips pressing over his own. The weight that comes with it, the desire that it earns. “And I love you. There’s no one else I’d want for my first time more than you.”

Soobin closes his eyes but Beomgyu sees his eyelids tremble just in time. He laughs, presses a finger over his eyebrows and smoothens the creases of his forehead. “Hyungggg,” he whines. “Look at me.”

Even though it’s been so long, Soobin still struggles with the idea that Beomgyu is going to be here, that he’s choosing to be here. And Beomgyu knows it will take him time to trust that, so he doesn’t say anything, just knocks his forehead with his own and looks him in the eye. “I love you.”

“Stop saying things like that.”

“Don’t you love me?”

Soobin pushes him back and hovers over him. He leaves a ghost of a kiss at the edge of his lips and moves down further and further till he bunches Beomgyu’s shirt up and brings it to his lips. 

He looks up from where he’s pressing light kisses on his belly and says, “Bite.”

Beomgyu pulls the fabric between his lips, tastes the slightly salty texture and gasps when Soobin trails a line over the middle of his stomach with his tongue. The fabric drags over his lips as the first of raindrops splatter against the windowsill beside Soobin’s bed and the balcony right by its feet. He feels the sensation settle inside him tenfold at that, sighs and barely resists the urge to push Soobin right where he needs him.

He is the most sensitive around his lower stomach, the curve of his hips there and the part running along his lower abdomen. Soobin seems to know it without Beomgyu needing to tell him. He noses over his abdomen, each warm exhale on tender skin sparkling a trail of fire down his spine. He kisses over his hips and Beomgyu melts in his arms, lets him do whatever he needs to with each fleeting gasp and tug of hair.

“More than you know,” Soobin says, kisses his stomach again. “I love you more than you know or can tell. More than you can imagine.”

The sincerity with which his words ring turns Beomgyu’s mouth dry. He doesn’t get a chance to accept or deny it because Soobin is back to mouthing along the lines of his chest, his hands immediately moving up further to play with his nipples. 

The bright light that rushes inside him is overwhelming in the best possible way, heat coiling in his guts in unavoidable desperation once again. Each touch Soobin leaves goes to his dick, every bit of his restraint flying with the stimulation Soobin’s mouth on his body gives.

Beomgyu parts his legs, toes gently curling when Soobin’s mouth finally finds its way to the nipple he’s tweaked raw and licks over it. Beomgyu says something incoherent, bucks up into the heat of his mouth but Soobin presses him down again. Keeping him right where he needs him. “I think of you in ways I haven’t ever thought of anyone before,” he says. “In ways I won’t ever be able to think of anyone again. I want you all the _time,_ Beomgyu. All the time, I love you more than you’ll ever know.”

The desperation in his voice is the same as the day he’d called Beomgyu drunk and repeated over and over again that he missed him, missed his voice, missed being around him. It settles thick in Beomgyu’s throat, ripping apart in a deep whine when Soobin _finally_ gives him the friction he needs, closes his mouth over one nub and _bites._

He arches up when Soobin treats his other nipple the same way before teasing his way back up to Beomgyu’s mouth, leaving a trail of bruises in his way. The mood shifts now into something inexplicable now. Under the weight of the rainy night over them, the dim lighting of the room minimising to nothing when it sheds a golden stream over the bend of Soobin’s face, the sweat on his brows, Beomgyu feels each nerve in his body sing with the newly found carnal desire surging in the room. Soobin takes his hands and pins them over his head, holds them there while bringing the other to trail down his chest. 

Beomgyu could cry out, ask him to do _something._ Anything. But he bites his lips and throws his head back, Soobin thumbs his spit-slick nipples and he feels his heartbeat through his chest. 

“You’re so sensitive it’s insane,” Soobin says. 

“Don’t― wait _,_ ” Beomgyu gasps when he presses a little too hard. It’s too much now, everything going to his dick and yet finding no release. He feels like he could come like this, if done for long enough ― he knows he’s tried it before with no success but it’s Soobin’s hands on him this time, it’s Soobin doing this to him. He doesn’t doubt Soobin can make him come like this, with a mouth on one his nipples and a hand tweaking another. There’s something about Soobin in general that gets him going, something about his little wide eyes and secretive smiles. His way of making you feel like you’re the only person in the world when he’s talking to you. “Wait.”

Soobin lets go of his hand, still hovering over Beomgyu but begins to lean back when he realizes Beomgyu’s getting up.

He looks confused but quickly figures out what Beomgyu’s trying to do when they’re both seated upright, basking in the liminal light of the nightlamp and the scent of Beomgyu’s lavender scented perfume that he carries with him everywhere. Beomgyu tugs at his sweatshirt and he grins at him in response, opening his mouth to say something that Beomgyu silences with a kiss, thumbing the hem still. Soobin smiles against his lips and acknowledges the cue, taking his shirt off and pulling it over his head when they part. It gives Beomgyu a minute or two to admire the flex of his still-to-develop muscles. He’ll get there, one day. Today is not that day.

“You’re a literal stick,” Beomgyu says and Soobin flicks him on his forehead, kneeling in front of him.

“I’ve been working out judiciously, I know what I look like right now.”

Beomgyu smiles and leans in closer into his space. “Yeah. A stick. You’re right.”

Before Soobin can say anything smart in retort, Beomgyu kisses his left shoulder, his collarbones and the hollow of his throat. Soobin tenses beneath his touch, especially when Beomgyu trails his kisses along the line of his throat and then to his chin. He winds his arms over Soobin’s waist and kisses him on the mouth, and Soobin loops his arms around Beomgyu’s neck to pull him closer.

The kiss hits differently this way when Beomgyu can still feel Soobin’s lips on his nipples, the bruises along his neck that he made. Soobin leans down to part his lips with his own and licks into his mouth, thrusts his tongue inside to bring them into newer unexplored territories Beomgyu’s always wanted to try but never had the chance to. And Beomgyu tries to give as much as he gets, tries to even out Soobin’s kisses with a grip around his waist. Soobin tugs his shirt off in one go, going back to kissing him just as he was before with nothing to separate them now and Beomgyu finds he simply _cannot_ reciprocate Soobin’s passion with anything. All he has is his hands exploring every inch of Soobin’s skin, the muscles stretching over his shoulder blades, the dip of his neck.

Something hot licks up his fingertips, down to the end of his spine, when Soobin pushes him back and pulls him close by the waistband of his pants. They lie chest to chest, skin flush against each other when Soobin bends down to kiss him again. Like this it’s glaringly obvious that Soobin has more advantage in between the two of them, the easier go at overpowering Beomgyu. And _fuck,_ if that doesn’t do things to him.

“You have a thing for being held down, don’t you?” Soobin asks, in between kisses.

“No,” Beomgyu lies because he can. “I don’t.”

“Okay.” Soobin ruts up where he kneels in between Beomgyu’s legs and Beomgyu keels in the friction it drives to his cock. Still clothed, separated by many unnecessary layers, Beomgyu can feel Soobin’s hardened length on his own and it drives every bit of his thoughts haywire, a little foggy. They’ve been in such a position before, without any layer of clothing in between, but Beomgyu never felt the same satisfaction at it than he does now. Maybe it’s the knowledge that Soobin loves him like he does, or the fact that he’s just as desperate. “This seems to say otherwise.”

Beomgyu looks away, out of the window and at the new night sky. 

“Look at me, Beomgyu-yah,” Soobin leans back upright. He tugs at the waistband of his pants, at the underwear beneath that Beomgyu _knows_ is soaked. “Is this okay?”

Beomgyu nods, bites his lips. Soobin pulls them both off in one go and now Beomgyu’s naked as the day he was born, shy under Soobin’s gaze. He half wants to hide himself, his dick lying fully hard on his stomach but he likes the way Soobin looks at him there. Likes the way he watches him with a kind of gaze that makes him feel a touch ashamed about being so hard by just a little kissing. 

“Stop staring,” Beomgyu says. “It’s weird.”

“You’re weird.” Soobin runs his hands up Beomgyu’s legs and sighs. He bends down to nip at the skin right above his knees, mouths along the inside of his thighs and before Beomgyu knows it, he’s biting down there as well. A hand on his mouth is all that Beomgyu has to contain the pathetic whine that slips out of him.

“Aiya― hyung, why do you keep―” he’s cut off when Soobin bites him again, the pain sending an inch of a delicious thrill to his dick. “Why do you keep _biting_ me?”

Soobin looks up from between his legs and the sight makes Beomgyu think he can pass out. “Do you not like it?”

“I― I don’t hate it.”

“Thought so,” Soobin smiles. “I’m fetching the lube now.” 

“Okay,” Beomgyu says, settles back into the pillow to close his eyes. He can’t believe this is happening.

Aside from himself the only person who’s come this close to his dick is Soobin and yet he feels shy at the idea of what’s going to happen. Soobin leans over him and Beomgyu can smell the musk off his skin, the slightly pungent smell of sweat and his post-shower cologne. It makes his stomach flip, the proximity, which is weird considering after all they’ve done _this_ is what’s making him shy. 

Soobin brings the bottle back and sits in between his legs and Beomgyu feels oddly naked before he raises his eyebrows as if to say _what?_

“You’ve touched yourself before, right?” He asks, alluding to what Beomgyu said all those nights ago. 

Beomgyu doesn’t even know why he’s embarrassed when he _knows_ Soobin has taken it up the ass before. Soobin had let it slip in one of their numerous cuddling sessions, and didn't tell him who it was when he asked. _A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell Beomgyu-ssi._

“I have,” Beomgyu says, fixing him with a look. “Yeah. I’ve tried it before.”

“With your fingers?”

“Literally what else, hyung?” 

“Just wanted to be sure,” Soobin shakes his head and then tips the bottle towards him. “Show me.”

Beomgyu exhales, heart beating so loud he can feel it in his ears. He takes the bottle from Soobin’s hand, operating on pure muscle memory since the nervousness drowns out any knowledge of what he’s supposed to be doing.

The rain rages on and Beomgyu wonders if it’s turning into a storm. The weather forecast didn’t mention a storm later, however, so he can’t tell.

He coats two of his fingers with an abundant amount of lube and tosses the bottle away, rubbing them together to warm it. He brings them to his rim slowly, highly aware of Soobin’s eyes on him. Hooking an arm beneath his leg, Beomgyu pulls it up and out of the way. Soon, he becomes too dazed to notice Soobin’s gaze turning into something else. Something dark, something primal and curious. 

“I’ve done this before,” Beomgyu sighs when he teases a finger at the pucker, prods a curious one inside. His body locks itself and he throws his head back, having been at edge for so long that even this much friction is delicious to him. “I’ve― _ah_ ― thought of you.”

“What was I doing?” Soobin asks, and he sounds urgent. “What was I doing when you thought of me?”

Beomgyu doesn’t answer at once, taken by the act of spreading himself wider in order to accommodate his fingers. After a few more moments of pushing against his rim, he slowly sinks a finger all the way inside. “You’d sit there and watch me,” he says, swallowing a gasp as he pushes it and out of himself. “And then you’d come over and hold me open instead.”

So Soobin does, keen on making his fantasies come true. Beomgyu moans with the sensation of having Soobin between his legs, eyes trained on his hole as it takes Beomgyu’s fingers, and hands pressing both his thighs apart. The pleasure is so great, so intense, that it makes him close his eyes and feel tears swim in the back of it. He’s a cryer, even all by his own ― pleasure overwhelms him.

“Hyung,” Beomgyu whines, mouth open in a half breathless gasp. “You’re too dressed.”

He watches Soobin look down at himself as if noticing he was still wearing his pants for the very first time despite the painful hard on he’s been sporting and Beomgyu would’ve laughed at the expression on his face if he hadn’t slipped another finger in alongside the first right at that moment. The slide becoming easier with the tension melting out of him, hole accommodating both of them inside. Soobin kneels back and Beomgyu watches him shimmy his flanks off, discarding it somewhere in their pile of clothes down on the floor.

Newly naked, Beomgyu swallows at the sight of Soobin’s hard dick in front of him. Soobin wraps a hand around it, strokes it once or twice to the rhythm of watching Beomgyu thrust his fingers in and out of him over and over again. He closes his eyes, trembling and tense, and still sees each hard ridge of Soobin’s abdomen, the veins on his cock thick and visible. 

Beomgyu must look a sight, all spread out for him with hickies down his torso and wet and glistening fingers slick with lube scissoring him open, lewd squelching noises every time he stretches his fingers inside and pushes it against the inner walls. _All for you,_ Beomgyu wants to say but he bites his lips instead. _All for you, always._

Soobin goes back to prying his thighs apart and just when he does so, Beomgyu hits a spot inside that makes him throw his head back and rock down on his fingers mercilessly just to find that feeling again. “Fuck,” Beomgyu cries. “Fuck that’s― there, that feels _so._ ”

Soobin leans down and kisses him and Beomgyu can feel himself begin to cry then. Soobin pulls his fingers out of his ass and lowers his thighs, kissing him slow and languid. “Shh,” he says. “You’re doing so good, baby. So good.”

At the term of endearment, Beomgyu tenses more. Soobin pulls away from his lips and smiles at the sight he finds. Beomgyu doesn’t care anymore, ruts down against Soobin’s thigh just for any bit of friction. 

“Can I do this?” Soobin asks, teasing a finger near Beomgyu’s rim. 

Beomgyu needs something, _anything._ “You don’t have to ask every time.”

“But I want to,” he says, kisses the inside of his thighs and then pulls them up ― pushing them apart. It almost ends up folding him in half but Beomgyu loves the burn in his thighs, the bit of pain mixed with pleasure that courses through him when Soobin empties some more lube on his fingers and rubs them together.

He leans down to kiss him again, keeping his legs where they’re bent and Beomgyu moans into Soobin’s mouth when he feels his fingers breach his rim.

There’s a difference in between fucking yourself with your own fingers and having someone else’s inside you. Soobin’s fingers are longer, thicker. He tries with one at first, moving them inside slowly and there’s something to be said about the feeling of having the fingers of someone you love inside you. Beomgyu feels his heartbeat lurch, registering on the farthest plane of his ribs and screaming. His breath stutters with each thrust, and when Soobin pulls back just so he can see the way Beomgyu’s hole flutters around his fingers, Beomgyu crosses his arms over his eyes to feel what he feels without the visual edging him to find release.

“Look at me,” Soobin says. “Look at the way you’re taking my fingers.”

“Shut up,” Beomgyu replies, but removes his hands nonetheless. Soobin kneels in between his legs, sweat outlining a faint shadow of abs that could be. Beomgyu feels his throat dry when he realizes, _yet again,_ that it’s Soobin’s hands inside him, taking him closer and closer to heaven.

One finger turns to two turns to three and before he knows it, his hole is gaping around Soobin’s fingers as he moves them in and out with little resistance. “You’re so fucking pretty,” Soobin leans down to kiss him again every time. “Makes me want to put my mouth on every inch of you.”

Each thrust pulls a whine out of him, more so when Soobin ducks and pulls his fingers out and Beomgyu sobs at how empty it suddenly feels. He’s about to protest, thrash around in Soobin’s hold but Soobin grips him hard. With lube slick fingers, he cups his ass and stretches them to reveal his hole clenching around nothing. It feels _marginally_ embarrassing but the sensation is dim compared to Soobin’s breath on such an intimate part of himself. 

“S-stop staring,” he says. “What’re you doin―”

It’s then that Soobin chooses to press his mouth there and Beomgyu feels something burst behind his eyelids. He bucks up the bed and Soobin follows, mouth still on him and hands pressing his hip back down. “What’re you _doing_?” Beomgyu cries, but he doesn’t want him to stop. “Hyung― what’re you―”

Soobin pulls away and looks at him. “I’ve got you, Gyu. Let go.”

With that he goes back to eating him out, presses his tongue at the pucker of his rim and dips inside. Beomgyu’s mind wipes into a clean slate, a gasp caught in his mouth. He reaches down to grab fistfuls of Soobin’s hair, get him where he needs him even if he doesn’t know _where_ that is. He knows he’s probably doing something embarrassing like pressing his ass on Soobin’s face but he’s too far gone to care and Soobin’s tongue is pressing inside him with increasing insistence. 

“ _Hy’ng_ ,” Beomgyu moans, arches off the bed once again when Soobin’s fingers find their way back to his hole, one slipping inside with ease. The combined effect of Soobin’s index pushing inside his hole, stretching the inner walls open with ease, and his tongue lapping at his rim and licking inside is too much. _Just a little more,_ he thinks. Just a little more and he knows he’ll come undone. 

He reaches down to touch himself and Soobin swats his hands away. Pulling off, he kisses Beomgyu before he can complain, lips tasting like the lube. Beomgyu fumbles around for the bottle blindly, hands reaching out until they find it and flip the cap open. He pours some into his hands and warms them between his fingers, trailing them down Soobin’s body all the way to his dick. He hasn’t got it in him to tease, wraps his hands around Soobin’s cock all at once and tugs. Soobin groans into his mouth, falling sideways in the crook of his neck and pressing a kiss there. “Yeah, fuck,” he mouths along the side of his neck. “ _Baby_.”

Beomgyu strokes up his length without finesse, drowning in the heat between the two of them. Soobin sucks a mark on his shoulders and Beomgyu’s fingers tighten around his cock, giving the head a light squeeze and digging in the slit. He locks his legs around Soobin’s waist when Soobin reaches to kiss him again. They don’t kiss as much as gasp into each other’s mouth, Soobin thrusting up into the circle of his hands and Beomgyu anticipating what it would feel like inside him. It’s thick and heavy in his hands and Beomgyu knows it’s bigger than what he’s had in him before, but he’s never wanted anything more in his life. 

As if reading his mind, Soobin pulls off and kneels between his legs, flushed red from his chest to the tip of his ears. “Fuck, let me―” he bites his lips when Beomgyu flicks his wrist a certain way, rubs his palm over the head. “ _Beomgyu,_ baby, stop. I don’t want to finish before I even get inside you.” 

Reluctantly, Beomgyu moves his hands away when he feels Soobin cover them over his dick. He watches him stroke himself, and feels more than sees two of Soobin’s fingers finding his hole again. “I’m ready― fuck.” Two fingers are just not enough anymore, not when he’s so loose and sopping wet already. “Hyung, I’m ready. I’m ready, _please._ ”

He knows he’s ready now, cock flushed hard and leaking on his stomach. He feels like even the slightest touch might get him going at this point, just a little friction and he’s done. It’s a miracle he’s even lasted this long but he knows it has something to do with Soobin making him wait for it. Soobin leans down to grab the condoms beside their now haphazardly thrown pillows and kisses him again. He’s filled with tears at the familiar scent of warmth around him, the familiarity bleeding in, seeping with each sepia undertone of the evening. 

Soobin leans back and tears the condom wrapper open with his teeth. Beomgyu watches each jump of the muscles on his arms, tracks a stray drop of sweat trailing down the side of his face in effort. He’s lying before Soobin so open and vulnerable, pliant and waiting and all he needs is for Soobin to touch him again. To get inside him and push him open, take what he needs and _only_ what he needs.

Beomgyu throws his head back when Soobin brings his cock to his hole, the sensation doubling when he feels it’s head catch at his rim. He’s never been in this place before, doesn’t know what to do with his hands except reach out blindly for Soobin and fall on his side when they don’t get to him. Soobin rubs the length of his cock down the slip of his ass and Beomgyu could die with how much he aches for it inside him.

Soobin braces himself on one arm and kisses Beomgyu, and slowly pushes inside.

Each nerve end in Beomgyu’s body sings, gasping into Soobin’s mouth. He arches off the bed, unconsciously pushing into Soobin’s warmth to try and take more of him in. But Soobin doesn’t hurry, keeps kissing Beomgyu in the odd, indefinite way he’s doing and slides in slowly. The lube makes it easier for him to slip in and Beomgyu knows that he’s probably loose enough for a little resistance but Soobin feels so _big_ inside him, even half of his length, that he doesn’t know how he’ll be able to fit more of him in.

“You’re so tight,” Soobin whispers, nips the top of his ears, “‘feels like you’re clenching down on me.”

The words make him do so. Beomgyu’s abdomen hurts with need and he twists around Soobin, clenches voluntarily just to see if it’ll make Soobin push harder.

But it makes Soobin lean back again, untangle himself from Beomgyu’s hold. Beomgyu reaches out for him immediately, close to tears because _no, come back, don’t stop._

Soobin kneels in between Beomgyu’s legs and watches him writhe. He hooks a hand over Beomgyu’s knees and pulls them apart, uses one hand to slowly pull his cock back out and rub it over his gaping hole just to push back in before Beomgyu can cry about the absence of it. It reaches further inside this time and Beomgyu scrambles for purchase on the pillow, probably babbling at this point. 

“Hyung― hyung, do it, fuck me please.” _Please. Please. Please._

Soobin laughs but it’s tinged with the undertale of a groan. He keeps repeating the motion, pulling back out a little and then pushing in further until the last of the resistance is gone and he slips in to the hilt with ease. 

Beomgyu moans out loud, feels Soobin’s hands on the side of his hips to steady him, feels him duck down to kiss over his chest, take one of his nipples into his mouth. 

It’s overwhelming. Beomgyu thrashes against Soobin, confused if he wants to fall into the warmth of Soobin over him or get away from it.

Soobin kisses up his chest and leans eye-level over him, tracking the side of his face with concern. “Are you okay?”

Beomgyu hiccups, embarrassingly so. “I’m okay,” Beomgyu says, reels in a cough like an idiot and makes a stupid observation. “You’re inside me.”

Soobin smiles and Beomgyu leans up on his elbow to press a light kiss over his dimples. When he falls back down then Soobin kisses him on the mouth, slowly as if to savour the taste. “I’m inside you,” he confirms. “Let me know when you want me to move.”

He says it like he can wait the whole night, like he can sit inside Beomgyu and drag it out till the sun rises and that makes Beomgyu laugh, albeit it turning into a hiccup when he feels Soobin’s cock twitch inside him.

It’s a weird sensation. Beomgyu has always wondered what it would be like to get dicked down, if he’d like to be fucked or do the fucking. Lying down here, feeling Soobin so intimately connected with a part of him, he thinks he won’t be able to go without this at all. That now that he’s been fucked, all he wants is to be fucked forever. Every sharp movement of Soobin’s dick makes his stomach tighten in wait, the touch of the muscles on his arms making him wonder what it would be like to be picked up and thrown around by him. 

“I’m ruined,” Beomgyu says, and it makes him cry. “You’ve ruined me for anything else.”

Soobin laughs, kisses his tears. “I haven’t even done anything.”

Beomgyu shakes his head, hands tying around Soobin’s arms. “Now,” he whispers into his ear, not trusting himself to still have a voice. He pulls him lower so he’s buried in the crook of his neck, locks his legs behind Soobin’s waist. “Now, move now.”

Soobin pulls back after pressing a small kiss there, choosing to look him in the eye when he pulls out till only the head of his cock is inside him and then pushes it back again. 

This is something he’s never felt before, the weight of someone inside him moving on their own accord. He’s had fingers, had toys too, but Soobin’s presence highlights every little thing more than it is. Beomgyu’s hole flutters with each hot drag of Soobin’s cock and he’s hyper aware of Soobin around him like this, bracketing his body with his bigger one, caging him in the circle of his hands and kissing him slow. He drops his mouth open, knowing he looks a sight, and groans throwing his head back. Soobin mouths along his jaw, presses a kiss under his chin and continues thrusting with more intention each passing second.

It’s _everything._ Beomgyu claws at Soobin’s back and Soobin increases his pace slowly but steadily until what he’s doing is driving deep into Beomgyu to make him tremble with restraint. He’s finding a rhythm, Beomgyu can tell ― and he’s aware of each sound Beomgyu’s making for any signs of discomfort. 

“You feel so good,” Soobin groans, going back to hold Beomgyu’s knees apart and slide in over and over again. Every thrust feels like a punch in his gut, shovelling him up and above his pillow nearing dangerously close to the headboard. “You feel better than anyone else I’ve been with.”

Maybe it’s the incoordination between his brain and his mouth at the moment, both too busy trying to reel in the assault of emotions, that makes him say it. “No one else,” he stutters out. “Only me.”

“Only you.” Soobin looks at him with something akin to wonder. “Only you, always.”

It makes Beomgyu reach down and hook his arms under his legs, trying to help Soobin. He spreads them apart as an invitation and Soobin’s watches him do this with the last of his self control. It escapes him when Beomgyu says _harder, want it harder hyung, want you to make me come._

“Fuck you’re,” Soobin cuts off, choosing instead to set a brutal pace with a hand on Beomgyu’s hips pulling him down to match each one of his thrusts and another going to wrap around his cock. His hold on him tightens, turns rough, pressing bruises wherever they land and one particular thrust makes Beomgyu heave in blind pleasure.

He twists, arching up. “There― there―”

Soobin manages to nail his prostate dead on with each one of his next thrusts, sweat collecting along the hard planes of his back and neck. The renewed force leaves Beomgyu incoherent, eyes so fixated on Soobin’s face that he doesn’t even realize the heat in his gut snapping until he’s coming around Soobin’s hand on him, leaking down his fingers.

Beomgyu sobs, the intensity of it leaving him breathless and numb. His body twitches, trying to get away and ride out his orgasm at the same time but Soobin doesn’t relent, grabs his hips and slows down.

Beomgyu lets go of his legs and they fall on the bed, loose and pliant. His guts churn in relief, and Beomgyu can feel his heart in his throat. Soobin leans over and kisses Beomgyu, his tear streaked eyelids and the high of his cheeks. “Are you okay?” he asks, gives an experimental thrust and Beomgyu swallows a cry. “We can stop.”

A semblance of coherence returns then, indignation crashing over him in waves.

“No,” Beomgyu shakes his head and tries to bring his legs behind Soobin to keep him there. _No,_ not yet. He doesn’t want this to stop yet. It hurts a little, right on the verge of overstimulation. But Beomgyu knows he can take more, Beomgyu knows he can take Soobin. “No, come on. Fuck me, look at me. I’m waiting for you to fuck me.”

Soobin parts his lips but nothing comes out and Beomgyu traces the side of his face with a finger, puts one on his bottom lip and digs it there to open his mouth for it. “Don’t you want to come inside me?”

Logically, both of them know there’s no _coming inside_ anyone today. However, all logic is lost in between the two of them today as Soobin breaks and thrusts in hard again. Beomgyu feels it in his mouth, the desire so true it courses right through him and into Soobin. He picks up the pace again and Beomgyu tries to push back as much as his body allows him to, craving for the touch, for the gaze, for the warmth of Soobin’s cock inside him, filling him to the brim.

Every arc of his body, the curve of his hips ― everything seems to burn with something primal now, fucking Beomgyu solely with the intention of chasing his own release. And Beomgyu takes it, he takes being jostled upwards with each thrust, takes pulling Soobin down and raking his hands on his back, takes being pounded so hard it feels like his every breath is being punched out of him. “Come in me,” Beomgyu gasps into his ears. “Come inside me, fill me up with it. Come on, come―”

Desperation licks up Soobin’s spine, something hot tightening in his guts. Every drag feels unbearable, and he bucks up even faster groaning at how Beomgyu’s hole throbs every time he brushes past his prostate.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he says, leans back to watch Beomgyu’s hole take the whole of him in. Beomgyu never thought he’d be at the receiving end of this look, never thought Soobin would hold him open just to watch him take his cock. This is a side of him he’s never seen before, only a little glimpse that night. The thought makes him moan aloud, still sobbing under Soobin. “ _Fuck,_ I’m gonna― gonna come.”

With the last bit of his resistance, Beomgyu closes his eyes and says, “Come for me.”

And that is what makes Soobin shudder, grind his cock deep into Beomgyu with one smooth stroke and double over finally coming into the condom. His hips move on their own, riding out his orgasm. Beomgyu can feel his hole flutter around him the more he moves, feel it settle over the shape of him inside. Amazed, Beomgyu reaches down at the pool of cum on his lower abdomen and presses there ― not particularly disappointed at being unable to feel anything. He trails it lower till he’s pressing it over Soobin’s cock still slowly moving to a stop, breathing heavily over him.

“I feel so full of you,” Beomgyu says.

Soobin’s eyes shine and he collapses on Beomgyu after he’s fully spent, groaning. His head is buried in between Beomgyu’s neck and shoulder and he kisses him there in apology. Beomgyu pulls his hand up, hissing when Soobin twitches inside him. “Sorry,” Soobin says, kisses him again. He pulls out slowly, thighs burning with exhaustion.

The emptiness Beomgyu feels instantly makes him cry again, and that’s nice. Beomgyu’s a _crier_ even _after_ sex.

Soobin laughs, tying the condom and pulling away entirely to climb off Beomgyu and Beomgyu wants to pull him back but he’s gone before Beomgyu can catch him, disappearing into his washroom. Beomgyu sighs, suddenly aware of how much his back burns, how tired he feels. He sinks into the sheets, trying to rub his tears off.

He hears water run in the washroom and a moment later, Soobin appears with a towel. Beomgyu stares shamelessly at the long line of his body, the gentle curve of his waist and Soobin raises an eyebrow at him. “See something you like?”

“Everything,” Beomgyu answers honestly, rakes his eyes over his person. “I see you.”

Soobin smiles, embarrassed and Beomgyu smiles back, eager to close his eyes and let sleep take him away. 

But the night is a night. Soobin cleans him up and the mess they made, carries him to the washroom and lets Beomgyu suck hickies on to his shoulders. When they come back, he deposits Beomgyu on the sheets and switches the night lamp off in one go. Beomgyu snuggles into his side, traces his jaw and glances up, “What about dinner?”

Soobin looks at him and leans down to kiss him, wraps his hands around Beomgyu and snuggles into his hair. “Let’s order in.”

“It’s already seven, do it now.”

“Shh,” Soobin whispers into his hair. “We’ve got time.”

  
  
  


(Beomgyu wakes up in the middle of the night and tip toes to his room. His back hurts, he realizes, ass sore from finally getting fucked like he’d always wanted to be. But he ignores it in favour of remember what it had felt like, the sex and the kisses that came in after.

He finds the notebook he doesn’t use anymore, the grey recycled paper cover and yellow linings still decorated with the doodles Taehyun had drawn over them while teaching him concepts of music theory. He flips through the scribbled pages, a mix of his own handwriting with Taehyun’s notes and remarks. They were working on a song together in Taehyun’s first year until final term shitshow happened and they forgot about it completely. The notebook lay in one of the drawers of his desk ever since, containing history and memories Beomgyu hadn’t touched until today.

The words don’t come to him like they used to, it was the reason why he’d left in the first place. But he still trails his fingers over the ones from before and remembers what it had felt like to love so much he was full of it.

He thinks ― Soobin’s lips on his is a good place to start, the weight of his body curling over him. The smile in sunlight, the kisses after waking up from a drowsy afternoon nap. The birthplace of love, right in the middle of life, in a place you’d least expect it.

So, he picks up the pen and begins writing the song without a name.)

  
  
  


This story boils down to this difference and this one alone: the difference between the love two people carry inside themselves.

That night they eat dinner and they go to sleep and wake up and fuck again. They do it slower this time, unhurried. Soobin kisses Beomgyu once he opens him up, tangles their fingers together on either side of his head and thrusts with the sole purpose of being as close as possible to him, of feeling every twitch and pull of him. He kisses Beomgyu’s tears from his eyelids and lets him cling on his person, and he feels so full of love then. He wakes up at some point in the night and finds Beomgyu straddling his thighs, complaining about being sore but still lubing up his cock. Soobin watches him do so in amusement, holds his hips, and eases him down on it. Beomgyu sets his own pace till he gets tired and then Soobin takes the cue, begins thrusting up into the heat of Beomgyu over him. He holds Beomgyu when he sighs in the afterglow, tracks every fleeting expression on his face as he reaches the high. He thinks Beomgyu is so pretty, so beautiful right before dawn and it fuels him on further till he’s well spent and tired and they just cannot go again. 

They shower together and Beomgyu smiles cheekily up at him as he pushes him under the shower head and blows him off once again, making him come for the third time that night. Soobin groans and fucks into his mouth, doesn’t know he’s done till they’re washing themselves clean and Beomgyu is wrapping a towel around his waist while stepping into his bathrobe.

Soobin drags him to sleep after they make toast and fried egg at four am in the morning and hooks himself onto Beomgyu’s back. Beomgyu simply melts into him, drawing circles on Soobin’s right hand where it curls around his waist. He smells like Soobin, like Soobin’s body wash and shampoo and it makes his stomach flip.

And he doesn’t think he can wake up again till he does. He does to a silent tune repeating on the keyboard Beomgyu bought for himself and a quiet hum of words he doesn’t know yet are written for him. There’s a slight daze of amber glowing behind his curtains, a smell of moist earth wafting through his room. He thinks he hears the sky rumble too, but he feels too weak to go and check.

Soobin falls asleep in seconds. He makes a quiet noise of discontentment when he reaches for Beomgyu on his side and finds no one. He would inquire, would get up and look for him but he can’t because the exhaustion he feels is bone deep and insatiable. It pushes him where he is and forces him to go back to sleep to make up for it.

And this, he finds, is home.

It’s been a realisation in the making for a long time. Soobin finds that he doesn’t struggle with the concept of love anymore when he can set it down in this little apartment in autumn fog, set it down in the seconds between him and Beomgyu, under the warm insulation of their home, without judgement. Soobin loves so much he doesn’t know what to do with it, and when he tells Beomgyu that, Beomgyu tells him he doesn’t have to do anything with it. 

Beomgyu, ever the ideal romanticist, tells him ― does it matter? Does it matter if love leaves him by the next sunrise if it was there in the first place? Does it matter if he doesn’t remember swallowing it when he remembers the taste? Beomgyu tells him that it doesn’t have to be that difficult, that love doesn’t have to be a chore. 

Soobin finds Beomgyu loves the same way he does anything. With patience, never forgetting its root. 

The difference, he realizes, is that there is none. Love offers you a home and a bed and a heart so full it beats carefully, wildly, plainly striking the skin of your heart.

Home, in existence, is a place of love.

  
  
  
  
  
  


(…) you’re still sleeping. I  
could wake you with a touch or a kiss.  
But so could I shake the petals from  
the wild rose which blossoms so silently  
and perfectly, and I do not.

**Mary Oliver** , from Good Morning in “Blue Horses: Poems”

**Author's Note:**

> **[trinitarias](https://ao3.org/users/trinitarias/) 6 mar:** i love this of u [describing chwebamgyu in poetry] im just casual 
> 
> [i swear i'll never leave again](https://open.spotify.com/track/5byXSKd7QOHtVMOiptklBD?si=307e3fa2c37f40ab) ― keshi  
> [눈,코,입](https://open.spotify.com/track/0lYtIvI7bO51PZSeK22Mbz?si=c10aeefc565f4578) ― taeyang  
> [this is how you fall in love](https://open.spotify.com/track/0742PcMPo2Akmo4vHC29VZ?si=c3348569e1a842a3) ― jeremy zucker  
> [your eyes tell](https://open.spotify.com/track/3TZ7NHkMT82AhwuYsd00Hz?si=6f9a4aef84af4e4d) ― bts
> 
> so it’s ... done. #i am sorry for being a shameless beomjunist. i tried my best to make it make sense but i apologize for the brainrot i have NEVER written e before in my life. I APOLOGISE FOR ALL THE RICHARD SIKEN REFERENCES TOO it’s a force of habit, a lifestyle. thank u for reading if u’re here and sorry about the bad writing, i wish it was not mine. couldn’t get the fic to get better, but i wrote it for the longest time. (12 days, to be exact.)


End file.
